Understanding 12-14-Year-Olds

How much independence should parents allow teenagers who claim rights and privileges, show excessive confidence and test the boundaries of discipline? How can parents handle the physical and emotional changes in their adolescent child?

This book offers helpful advice to parents whose children have reached the turbulent teenage years. From conflict management to issues of bullying, stealing and smoking, it guides parents as their children alternate between maturity and immaturity and develop their own identity. It explains the impact of school life, group pressures and close friendships on 12-14-year-olds' development and helps parents to offer their child support, while accepting his or her increased need for privacy. Alongside these challenges, the author reveals the rewards of sharing in these young people's enthusiasm and ambitions, as they grow more confident and responsible.

This book provides practical and sensitive advice for parents to help them relate to and communicate with their child at a difficult time of transition, while being prepared to question what they thought they already knew about their son or daughter - and about parenting.

Auteur

Margot Waddell, PhD(Cantab), MACP, MBPAS is a psychoanalyst and consultant child psychotherapist in the Adolescent Department of the Tavistock Clinic. She has written extensively on adolescence, including on groups, gangs and scapegoating, and is author of Inside Lives: Psychoanalysis and the Growth of Personality (1998).

Margot Waddell lives in London.

Contenu
Foreword, Jonathan Bradley. Introduction. 1. Other Bodies: Other Selves. 2. Sexuality. 3. School Life: The Primary/Secondary Divide. 4. Groups: Inclusion and Exclusion. 5. A Question of Identity: "Who am I?" 6. Running Into Difficulties. 7. Life in the Family. Helpful Organizations. Index.