When Worry Works: How to Harness Your Parenting Stress and Guide Your Teen to Success

Helps parents manage the stresses of adolescent achievement culture and to make decisions which align with their values, rather than driven by their anxiety. WHEN WORRY WORKS responds to one of the primary sources of the nation's worsening adolescent mental health crisis - achievement pressure. Burdened by the mounting pressures on today's youth, parents seek ways to strike the balance between supporting their teens' current well-being while also setting them up for future success. Eager to take action and to manage their escalating fears, parents inadvertently and unknowingly exacerbate the problem by overlooking their own parental achievement anxiety. Based on thirty years of clinical practice and her experiences raising her own teenagers in New York City, Dr. Dana Dorfman believes that when parents become aware of their individual anxieties and learn to effectively manage them, they are empowered to make values aligned, rather than worry driven parenting decisions. Through the use of her signature frameworks like the Parent Anxiety Reaction Type (PART), Dr. Dorfman provides practical evidence-based parenting strategies, exercises, and reflective prompts to guide parents through a process to constructively apply to their day-to-day parenting decisions. Through her thoughtfully refreshing and relatable style, she teaches readers to identify and harness their individual parental anxiety and to clarify their core values - equipping parents to improve their communication, relationships, wellbeing, and to parent their teens more confidently. Ultimately, parents more effectively guide their teen toward their authentic goals: to raise happy, successful, and independent adults.