Most parents have a hard enough time with their child’s alienation, without having to endure abuse from the child. While no one is completely immune to the effects of verbal abuse, our children probably have more power than anyone to make us feel helpless, hopeless, guiltridden, and depressed. This is because our children are the people in whom we’ve invested the greatest amount of love, time, and money and for whom we have had the highest hopes of being loved in return.


​In addition, most if not all parents get their selfesteem as parents from how their children treat them. If their children are loving and respectful, most parents feel not only proud of their children’s behavior, but proud of the reflection that the adult child holds up to them as parents. Alienated parents are deprived of this mirror and have to work much harder to maintain their selfesteem and psychological balance.


For those with children whose lives haven’t gone well, the parent has the double sorrow of worry about the child, and guilt and sorrow that there isn’t the closeness with that child that they assumed would be there at this point in their lives.


In this webinar we’ll learn why alienated adult children behave in disrespectful and abusive ways, how to best respond whey they do.


Dr. Coleman is a psychologist in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan organization of leading sociologists, historians, psychologists and demographers dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best practice findings about American families.
He has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, NBC THINK, The Behavioral Scientist, CNN, MarketWatch, the San Francisco Chronicle, Greater Good Magazine, AEON, Huffington Post, Psychology Today and more. He has given talks to the faculties at Harvard, the Weill Cornell Department of Psychiatry and other academic institutions. A frequent guest on the Today Show and NPR he has also been featured on Sesame Street, 20/20, Good Morning America, PBS, America Online Coaches, and numerous news programs for FOX, ABC, CNN, and NBC television.

He is the author of numerous articles and chapters and has written four books: The Rules of Estrangement (Random House); The Marriage Makeover: Finding Happiness in Imperfect Harmony (St. Martin's Press); The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework (St. Martin's Press); When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don't Get Along (HarperCollins)

He is the coeditor, along with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use, a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family, gender, sexuality, poverty, and workfamily issues.

His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Russian, Polish, and Croatian.


​He is the coeditor, along with historian Stephanie Coontz of seven online volumes of Unconventional Wisdom: News You Can Use, a compendium of noteworthy research on the contemporary family, gender, sexuality, poverty, and workfamily issues.


Dr Coleman also writes music for film and television. His music has been featured on Lethal Weapon, Chicago Fire, Chicago PD, Longmire, Shameless, Keeping Up With the Kardashians, Fresh Off the Boat, Supergirl, Mistresses, Hustlers, RuPaul's Drag Race and many more.