BookBrowse Reviews Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads by Rosalind Wiseman, Elizabeth Rapoport

From the author of Queen Bees and Wannabees - advice for parents on how to handle difficult situations involving teachers and other parents with grace.

From the book jacket: What happens to Queen Bees and Wannabes when they grow up? Even the most well-adjusted moms and dads can experience peer pressure and conflicts with other adults that make them act like they're back in seventh grade. In Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads, Rosalind Wiseman gives us the tools to handle difficult situations involving teachers and other parents with grace.

Queen Bee Moms & Kingpin Dads is filled with the kind of true stories that made Wiseman's New York Times bestselling book Queen Bees & Wannabes (the inspiration for the movie Mean Girls) impossible to put down. There are tales of hardworking parents with whom any of us can identify, along with tales of outrageously bad parents—the kind we all have to reckon with. For instance, what do you do when parents donate a large sum of money to a school and their child is promptly transferred into the honors program – while your son with better grades doesn't make the cut? What about the mother who helps her daughter compose poison-pen e-mails to yours? And what do you say to the parent-coach who screams at your child when the team is losing? Wiseman offers practical advice on avoiding the most common parenting "land mines" and useful scripts to help you navigate difficult but necessary conversations.

Comment: Rosalind Wiseman is the co-founder of the Empower Program, a national, nonprofit educational organization that aims to "empower young people and adults to create safe schools and communities by providing effective prevention strategies to address bullying and other forms of peer aggression," she is also the author of the bestseller Queen Bees and Wannabees, and the mother of two boys. Most importantly, she knows her stuff! Most parenting books spend their time advising parents on how to "improve" their children, with modest lip-service to the roles that the parents themselves are modeling - probably because most adults don't much like being criticized and they're the ones buying the books!

Wiseman's first book exposed the bitchy world of cliques and "queen-bee" teens - but here she goes further into the hive, to explore the psyches of the queen bee moms (and king-pin dads) who were once teenagers and who, more often than not, are busily nurturing the next generation of "queen-bees". Wiseman counsels parents to find a happy medium between being overprotective parents and frighteningly passive - offering advice on how parents should approach difficult situations with coaches, teachers and, of course, other parents.

Some of the specific areas covered are how and when to step into your child's conflicts, why too many well-meaning dads don't get involved as much as they should, how to handle parties and risky behavior and have respectful yet honest conversations with other parents about these issues.

As Library Journal puts it, "Ours is a messy, get-ahead-now world. Wiseman makes sense of it. Highly recommended."

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in May 2006, and has been updated for the February 2007 edition. Click here to go to this issue.