cover image The Essential Guide to the New Adolescence: How to Raise an Emotionally Healthy Teenager

The Essential Guide to the New Adolescence: How to Raise an Emotionally Healthy Teenager

Ava L. Siegler. Dutton Books, $24.95 (271pp) ISBN 978-0-525-93970-2

What's new about adolescence is that it starts earlier, lasts longer and is filled with greater perils than ever before. For parents struggling to cope, Siegler, director of the Institute for Child, Adolescent & Family Studies in New York City and columnist for Child magazine, explains reasonably the physical and psychological changes of adolescence and their impact on the entire family. She sees adolescents as having five basic developmental tasks--e.g., separating from old ties, creating new attachments--and five basic fears, e.g., of the unknown, about the body. In credible sample dialogues, Siegler shows how parents and adolescents often misconnect and how parental use of compassion, communication, comprehension, and competence can help. Case studies of five individual adolescents experiencing extreme anxiety, rebellion, withdrawal, depression and overattachment illustrate the ways in which each teen's family story contributed to these problems and how therapy helped the adolescents find their way back to normal development. Siegler distinguishes routine problems from those warranting professional intervention and concludes this helpful, well targeted guide with advice on choosing a therapist. Psychotherapy Book Club selection. (Oct.)