A sensitive, smart guide to raising teens that emphasizes love, respect, trust, admiration, and empathy.
Debut author Kallanian, a longtime counselor and consultant, offers an upbeat, thoughtful and unique approach to understanding and parenting teens.
The author’s premise is that parents can themselves benefit from the process of raising, loving, and instructing their teens, because the teaching process is a two-way street. He explains that in his 16 years of working with teens (including many at risk), he witnessed a repeated pattern of development, for which he coined an acronym: EPIC—Explore, Play, Inspire, and Connect. He describes each of these components in detail and notes that adults can use and apply these same principles in their own lives. “Teens have answers you are looking for, but you must value their existence, respect their opinion, appreciate what they are trying to achieve, and listen to what they have to say,” he writes. This highly readable work provides some gold nuggets of insight; for example, the author asks parents to put aside the stereotype of the teenage “bad” attitude: “If teenagers wrote books on managing their parents’ emotions and actions, imagine how those titles would read!” He asserts that placing one’s trust and faith in a teenager isn’t a mistake; although kids appear to be bumbling and stumbling their ways through many problems and dilemmas, they can also successfully solve them on their own. He says that if parents understand teens’ needs and values, they can better cope with their behavior—or misbehavior—and evolve better communication skills. To that end, the book explores verbal, nonverbal, and “paraverbal” communication, boundaries and consequences, and other specific ways to connect with teenagers. It also includes hypothetical conversations with spot-on teenage dialogue as well as chapter summaries that help to clarify the author’s theories throughout the text.
A sensitive, smart guide to raising teens that emphasizes love, respect, trust, admiration, and empathy.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499205893
Page Count: 192
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An eloquent diatribe against divorce as an entitlement in which the interests of other ``stakeholders,'' particularly children, are subordinated to the enhancement of self. Social historian Whitehead (who first advanced her argument in an award-winning 1993 Atlantic Monthly piece) contends that under the prevailing ethic of ``expressive individualism,'' divorce has become the psychologically approved response to marital dissatisfaction and, as such, morally neutralized (``no right or wrong reasons . . . only reasons'') and socially sanctioned. It is, she contends, even applauded, by the likes of liberals, feminists, and psychotherapists, whose agendas conveniently blind them to consequences that have surfaced on reappraisal. If, as Whitehead maintains, the early supporters believed that ``adults were emotionally fragile and need divorce, while children were emotionally resilient and could handle it,'' later studies bear out her own conclusion, felicitously articulated, that married parents have greater capacity to invest in their children both affectively and instrumentally and also ``to recruit other sources of social and emotional capital.'' Whitehead weakens her fine case for ``the norm of permanence'' when she fails to tame her tendency to caricature and accuses straw men of ``eroticizing'' the ``Love Family'' that putatively supplants the broken nuclear unit. These traits betoken a decidedly selective vision, as does the metonymic representation of contemporary American culture by a privileged subculture (one fluent in Friedan and Freud and affluent enough to forsake economic mobility for ``psychological entrepreneurialism''); ditto some idiosyncratic choices of historical reference points (Edith Wharton novels) and psycho- sociological citations. Whitehead's ethical bias in favor of responsible parenting is unassailable, however: Marriage, she says, is ``children's most basic form of social insurance,'' and marriages with children should be considered ``a special kind of trust.'' Her confrontation with that tough reality merits attention and support. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43230-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1996
Grating ``inspiration'' alleviated by patches of genuinely moving memoir. Baywatch star Alan-Williams (A Gathering of Heroes, 1994) found the road from boyhood to manhood fraught with obstacles. He has overcome alcohol and drugs, as well as a sexist attitude toward women. He used to be a deadbeat father: Like many men, he was ashamed that he couldn't make enough money to support his son as generously as he wanted to, so he sent nothing. Having grown up without a father himself, he eventually realized that his journey would have been much easier if he'd had someone to show him the way, someone who could have lent him a ``map'' of his own experience. So he decided to become a father to his own son. This book is a further gesture toward Alan-Williams's commitment to showing boys the way. In a feminist era, some of his rhetoric seems dated; in many passages (those about self-respect, for instance, or facing fears of failure) the word ``person'' could easily be substituted for ``man.'' However, there are others whose gender specificity is valuable; in one chapter he asks why war and violence are always viewed as the ultimate passages to manhood. Alan-Williams writes well about his own complicated experiences. He describes ``Mr. Blue,'' his mother's boyfriend, who left a mixed legacy about being a man, taking an active and caring interest in the boy, yet abusive to his mother, in the end nearly killing her. However, the inspirational mission of this book is too self- conscious. Alan-Williams constantly repeats peppy mantras like ``Suit up and show up for life.'' And sometimes he talks down to his readers: ``There's this guy I like to listen to, his name is Deepak Chopra.'' Alan-Williams's road is paved with good intentions, but we can't help feeling we've been down this path before. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48687-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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