You Don't Really Know Me: Why Mothers and Daughters Fight, and How Both Can Win

I'm a mother of 3 daughters - the eldest a teenager. I was excited about a book to help me throught these very difficult years. I found the book to be very well researched and an easy read. The author was amazingly detached though she is the mother of 2 daughters. The author offered her sympathy to mothers - that's certainly appreciated. The dialogs were interesting; specifically repeating the horrible things that other girls say to their mothers. The dissections of various conversations were wothwhile. However, while I understand that including other family members make any analysis more difficult, the fact that these pairs seemed to exist in a vacuum (very little mention of other parents and especially siblings) made the situations appear unreal and therefore difficult to apply to normal families. The book was useful in interpretting the hidden meanings of some accusations that a teenage girl uses. The strategies and advise on how to improve one life with a teenage girl as part of a familty were scant. Only in those extreme cases of eating disorders were several approaches discussed. In essence, the message I took away was, "we should just get thru this knowing that it can't last forever." I could accept this about the pain associated with childbirth, but not the behavior of a nasty teenage daughter - it can go on for years and affects not only the long suffering mother but everyone in the house right down to the dog. I found it painful to finish this book since I had some pretty high hopes when I began it and the author clearly understands her subject well. I think fathers could benefit from reading this book as they don't typically understand what might be going on. I would recommend it to other parents.