Reddit reviews The Parent's Handbook: Systematic Training for Effective Parenting

I don't have kids but I found that reading some parenting books has helped me to understand both about myself and things that my parents did wrong, and how normal healthy parents respond to their kids. "The Conscious Parent" is an amazing book for this. It is to teach parents how to respond to their kids in a healthy way while being conscious of their own reactions and feelings and how to NOT put your issues on your kid. It's a great book. I love what the author is doing in trying to teach parents how to respond to their kids lovingly and not as a reaction /due to their own issues.

https://www.amazon.com/Conscious-Parent-Transforming-Ourselves-Empowering/dp/1897238452

This STEP parenting series is also good about how to talk to kids and what consequences are supposed to be like. (not crazy insane screaming punishments and 6 month groundings, like happened at my house) There's a different book for each age range.

https://www.amazon.com/Parents-Handbook-Systematic-Effective-Parenting/dp/0979554209/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504368293&sr=1-1&keywords=step+parenting+systematic

The fact that you are concerned about how to best respond to your potential child and how it will make them feel means you are already far ahead of your parents. N parents don't think about this stuff.

I believe my stepdaughter (now 20) has bpd. She wasn't particularly bratty as a teen, but I think part of the reason for that was because I worked with seriously troubled teens and my stepkids knew not to tangle with me. You are right, being a brat is a normal part of being a teen. Couple this with an unstable birth mother, a stepparent, and the "I can just go to my other parent's house" and your stepdaughter probably has it much worse than others.

The behaviors that I noticed that led me to believe that my stepdaughter has bpd wasn't being a brat and talking back. Instead, this is what I saw. We started noticing these things when she was around 10 years old, but there is no telling when they each actually began.

1. She was unable to see/understand normal boundaries between people. At age 10 she described an elderly woman who lived next to her bus stop and sometimes said a few words to her in the morning as her best friend. And she had friends her own age, so it wasn't like she was desperately trying to have a friend. She literally did not understand that the woman was not her friend because of the age difference and the lack of really meaningful interactions. While this can be attributed to her being young, it was the first sign that she would have relationships that just didn't seem right. When she was in high school, there were at least two teachers that she was, in my opinion, too close too. Teachers should not be talking to students like friends - confiding things about their marriages and personal problems. She would also be too close to the parents of her friends. One parent even told my daughter that she had cancer before she told her own son.
   
2. Lying to maintain and control relationships. For me, this is the most painful one. As far as I can tell, my stepdaughter is constantly lying. Not the normal lying that people do to stay out of trouble - "No, I didn't eat your cookies." - but lying about who she is, what she believes and what she likes. She is *always* pretending to be the person that the person she is talking to wants her to be. She is always wearing a mask. If she says "good morning" to you, it is basically a lie because it is just part of her role. People with bpd don't really know who they are, they don't have a fixed identity. So, while this is *very* frustrating to me as a parent, I also try to have sympathy for my stepdaughter. When she was 10 my husband's uncle pulled my husband aside and told him that he didn't believe the lies that my stepdaughter was telling him. He wouldn't say what the lies were. When my husband and I confronted my stepdaughter, we didn't even get to the part where we mentioned the uncle's name. She immediately broke down and yelled, "I don't hate you guys!" This is when we found out that she was telling lies about us to everyone. As most women know, an easy way to make a friend is to trash talk someone else. My daughter was using these lies about us to get sympathy from others and to manipulate them. She's 20 now. I don't think she is lying about us right now, but that is because she wants to portray "perfect family" to others. As soon as she sees more benefit from telling people horrible lies about us, she will.
   
3. An inability to maintain relationships. I call this crush and crash. There are technical terms, but I don't remember them. She would find a new friend who was her best friend ever, or a group of friends. This friendship would involve a lot of pretending as she tried to keep up the role. She would also be trying to manipulate and control the other person. These friendships worked better on teens who were on the fringes - it really didn't work well with popular kids. As my mother-in-law says, "She's always picking up strays." People with difficult lives seem to be easier for her to control. More than relationships would end up crashing. It wasn't like she would just lose a friend or two. Instead, she would feel the need to run away from all the lies that she built up. Twice this resulted in her being homeschooled - once for a year, once for a semester. And twice it ended with her moving several states away to live with her birth mother. Now that she is 20, this is what I've seen. She started working at the factory where my husband works while she was pregnant. She was very popular, playing the young mother-to-be and perfect couple with her boyfriend who also got a job at the factory. She lost her job late in her pregnancy because she was sick too much and missed too many days. About 6 months after she had her baby, she went back to work at the factory. This time around a large group of her coworkers hated her - the very same group of people that loved her before. It has toned down now since it's been a year. But for a long time she was constantly complaining about how poorly the other women at work were treating her.
   
4. Paranoia. I don't think all people with bpd are paranoid, but some of them are. This is something that she tries to hide to an extent. I only have one detailed memory of an incident. My stepdaughter and my niece were staying at my mother's for a week during the summer. My mother took them and dropped them off at the local pool to spend the afternoon. My daughter called not too long afterwards and asked for them to be picked up. Apparently there was an older girl there (around 18?) who was giving my stepdaughter really mean looks, talking about her, making comments towards her... So, it isn't out of the realm of possibility that some random stranger was behaving this way, but chances are that this did not happen at all. It was all just my stepdaughter's paranoia. I don't remember any other specific incidents - but they are mostly similar to this, my stepdaughter interpreting someone's behavior in a very paranoid manner. I think that she may also hallucinate with her paranoia. I wasn't home at the time, but we used to live in a house with a large bush right next to the front porch. Apparently, my stepdaughter was sitting on the front porch and talking on the phone. She looked over and saw a man hiding in the bush next to the porch watching her. She ran inside and got my husband, but by the time he got out there the guy was gone. Now, it's possible that there was a guy there. But we were living in the country, so it isn't like we were in a neighborhood with lots of people. It would be pretty random for someone to be out there near our house. And our dog was on the porch with our daughter. The chances that our dog was there and didn't notice a stranger and start barking like crazy? Very slim.
   
   Being a brat as a teenager is normal. I hope that you read this stuff and say, "Wow, my stepdaughter is just a brat. This is great." Even with that...parenting a teen can be super hard. I worked with seriously troubled teens for 15 years, and I basically consider that I failed in parenting my stepchildren through their teens. Well, that is being really hard on myself. But my stepdaughter ended up on drugs, dropped out of school 3 months before graduation and got pregnant at 18 - she was living with her birth mother at the time, but still I raised her not to do those things. My stepson, 18, was grounded for the majority of his high school years. He has a genius IQ, but he is working at a factory now because his grades were too low to go to college. But...my stepdaughter is pretty stable now. She's got a new boyfriend who is a good person. She's pregnant again, but it's because an IUD failed, not because she was being irresponsible. She's kept her job for a year. She's uBPD, everything is likely to come crashing down eventually, but right now things are good for her. My stepson is doing very well at his job, we weren't sure that would happen, and he's saving for college.
   
   My point is that the teen years can be really hard, but if you parent well enough things will stabilize when they get past their teens. You just need to keep them alive, in school and out of trouble with the law. The things that you try to teach them now are going to bounce right off of them. I can't tell you how many times I have heard, "Mom told me." "Mom tried to tell me." "Mom warned me." All of those things I said didn't help much when they were in their teens, but they remember them now that they are older. When I worked with seriously troubled teens we would say that we were planting seeds. You teach teens things, they don't accept them, they don't use them...but when they are older they will remember and use what you taught them (hopefully).
   
   You may take at look at a book called The Parent's Handbook: Systematic Training for Effective Parenting it's the parenting method that was taught to parents when I worked with troubled teens. There is also a free parenting course on Coursera. It is mainly focused on younger children, but then at the end tells you how to tweak things for teens. You can take the course for free by auditing it, no need to pay, do quizzes or assignments. I'd also recommend skipping the recommended readings as they are not necessary.

I've worked in child care for 14 years and have two kids. I use S.T.E.P. in the classroom and at home. If you can take the class, awesome. If you can't, the book is cheap, short and self explanatory. Good luck