Teen Stages: The Breakthrough Year-by-Year Approach to Understanding Your Ever-Changing Teen

by Ken Mellor

Teen Stages is a breakthrough in understanding the teen years, and a must-have for parents looking to help their child make the best of their adolescence. Any parent can tell you that a 13-year-old is as different from a 16-year-old as Jekyll is from Hyde. So why do we talk about "teens"―and give advice on raising them―as if they're all the same? No wonder so many parents are frustrated…they don't have the right techniques that speak to their teen at the right time. Teen Stages is the first guide to each year of a teen's development, giving you tactics specific to the stage your child is experiencing. With easy-to-apply advice, plus helpful activities and checklists you can use right away, you will learn how your child's moods and behavior change as they move through the six stages of Once you understand the stage your teen is at, you'll have the keys to understanding why they act the way they do, what they really need, and how to communicate with them.

Genres: Parenting

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[JaNel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good overview of the stages of teen development and young adulthood. Her analogies seem a little forced at first but they do work and help.
I like her parallels and explanations of how teen hold is very similar to early childhood—including birth.

[David Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this book. But the writing is sometimes tough to decipher... for example, from page 184: "At the same time, putting our points of view can contribute to wonderful debates." There is something missing from that sentence and it makes me go back and read it again and try and decipher... They mention early on that parts of the book are based on another work of theirs, ParentCraft: A Practical Guide to Raising Children Well, and at times it feels like maybe I missed something from that book that would have made this "excerpted" version more comprehensible. It isn't until half way through the book that they actually get to the specific stages they are alluding to. I would have much preferred to have read the stages first and then the front half might have made more sense as to how parents can better deal with these stages.

The reason I gave it three stars rather than fewer is that if you wade through this there are some very practical and useful tools and phrases. I'm not sure how much faith I put into the specificity of their stages concept (and I wonder if this was written more with girls in mind than boys), but there are some very useful thoughts on the need for parents to "change gears" and remember what job we are fufilling, and how keeping that in mind allows us to better understand when to back off and let teens learn for themselves and when to weigh-in and help keep things on track. And even when we can't keep all that straight, using the specific phrases to elicit greater conversation are very useful.

[Bethany · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good ideas, some good information, but doesn't cover except in the briefest possible manner how big life events (eg pregnancy, divorce, family illness etc) affect teens and may change their behaviour. Very much for the very ordinary nuclear family.

[Hans G]

This is a wonderful resource that I refer back to often and read again as my own children enter new stages.