The Grown-Up’s Guide to Teenage Humans: How to Decode Their Behavior, Develop Unshakable Trust, and Raise a Respectable Adult

Youth advocate Shipp (Jump Ship) provides an accessible but superficial primer for helping parents understand and guide their kids through the often confounding adolescent years. With a colloquial and straightforward style, Shipp discusses major developmental phases and challenges common to young adults ages 12–18. He says this account is backed up by the work of “an incredible team of researchers, psychologists, and scientists,” few of whom are actually mentioned in the text. Shipp addresses an array of typical problems faced by adolescents, including issues with communication, drugs, trust, dangerous behavior, screen time, school, and sex, each one accompanied by simple and logical action steps. A former at-risk foster child himself, Shipp seems to orient this book to parents of “problem” kids, declaring that no matter how troubled, “every kid is one caring adult away from being a success story.” Full of sound bites (“What you don’t talk out, you act out”), lists (“The Seven Things Every Teen Needs to Hear”), and other refrigerator-magnet-like reminders, this book reads like a transcript from one of Shipp’s public-speaking gigs. Parents will find more substantive info in Frances Jensen’s The Teenage Brain on why teens act the way they do, as well as better advice and less hype. Agent: Erin Niumata, Folio Literary. (Sept.)