A few of the topics covered in the book:
•Why most parents are worrying about the wrong dangers for their teens. They try to protect teens from abduction by strangers but overlook equally serious risks that are over 300 times more likely!
•How we can reduce teen pregnancy rates by 50%, without even talking about sex education!
•How and why being popular in adolescence increases risks of drug use and delinquency.
•Why ‘get a job’ can be the exact wrong prescription for many teens…and what they should be doing instead.
•How ‘precocious affluence’ has come to infect our teens’ lives…even as parents find themselves struggling financially.
•Stunning new research that shows that teen brains are more capable than adult brains in important ways…and how we’re letting these capacities go to waste.
•How and why societies without juvenile delinquency are not only possible, but have been the norm throughout much of human history.
•How we’ve come to believe that certain tasks are beyond the abilities of our modern, highly-nurtured teens, even though teens routinely took them on 100 years ago!
•Why high school as we know it is a disaster, and how we can end it in ways that leave our teens far better educated.
•How we’ve abdicated the process of socializing teens to the peer group—and how we can take it back.
Joe and Claudia Allen shed new light on all of these issues—and more—while providing parents with practical, hands on guidance for helping their teens grow up in these challenging times. All of this is based solidly on their award-winning research with thousands of teens, their years of clinical experience helping struggling parents and teens, and their own experiences as parents of three adolescents.
