THE FAMILY HANDBOOK OF ADOLESCENCE

Written by a Yale Medical School pediatrician and psychiatrist, this excellent guide to adolescence may become the well-thumbed companion to Speck's Baby and Child Care. The scope is ambitious--from driver ed to nutrition to birth control choices--and the tone is authoritative and reassuring. Teenagers may find it helpful too. Covering both normal development and common disorders, it includes physiological and medical subjects (sexual development variables, acne) and also considers psychological matters (fantasies, needs for privacy), keeping the discussions of rebelliousness, etc., to an appropriate proportion. Adolescence is a process, they suggest, not an event, and their comments take into account individual differences and parental discomforts. In the tender areas--smoking, drinking, drugs--they provide essential information and a point of view without sounding priggish, and they mike sure parents understand their influence as models. There are a few ragged edges and the authors tend to assume that each family still has a family doctor. But overall the advice is specific when necessary, open-ended when not, and moved along by timely anecdotes and clever asides.