Parental Presence

by Haim Omer

The recent proliferation of news items that involve youth and violence has people from many fields clamoring for answers. Mental health professionals are being asked to intervene in more and more cases where young people are described as “out of control” and parents see themselves as lacking any control. Fear and resignation are what families too often are left with.

Now, best-selling Israeli author Haim Omer steps forward to offer hope to the growing number of parents who feel increasingly helpless in the face of the daunting challenges of bringing up children in contemporary society.

Parental Presence: Reclaiming a Leadership Role in Bringing Up Our Children will provide mental health professionals of every discipline — and parents from every walk of life — with the keys to an integrative parenting approach that works. Although there has been much talk about the impact on a family when one or both parents is literally absent, there has been less about what is perhaps even a more pervasive sort of absence — when the parent lives in the household but has withdrawn from the parenting role.

Weaving together a wide array of powerful case excerpts, this book describes — and shows in action — ways to regain the parenting role by employing a unified concept of love and firmness. The guiding tenets of parental presence are first introduced and then analyzed in light of behavioral, systemic, and humanistic approaches. Next, the author shows how parents can recover the capacity to take action and considers the influences of others on parental functioning. The loss and retrieval of personal identity are discussed, as are novel ways to deal with impasse and promote resolution. Finally, Omer takes a realistic look at how to involve children in therapy without weakening the parent’s position.

Parental withdrawal usually is the result of feeling overwhelmed by a child’s demands, complaints, threats, or other types of aggression. Parental Presence offers a practical and profound antidote to it.