A wide-ranging guide to understanding and cultivating better relationships with teenagers.
Raising teens can be tough, but counselor Caso’s practical guide aims to help.
The author, a family counselor with 20 years of experience, offers a helpful manual to help parents, stepparents, and other caregivers forge stronger bonds with teenage kids. She draws on illustrative stories from her practice and from her own life as a parent to explore the changes that emerge in adolescence: “Many teens who come to my office tell me, ‘We don’t talk about how we feel at home. I would like to feel closer to both of my parents,’” she reveals. The book also addresses LGBTQ+ issues, communication styles, common barriers to a feeling of belonging, and how to break cycles of negative interaction: “Often parents come into family therapy to discuss rules and what a teen isn’t doing well,” Caso writes. “Teens come to therapy wanting to discuss the relationship. I see this dichotomy over and over again in sessions.” If caregivers work to listen without judgment and empathize, this book asserts, they can foster closeness, trust, and transparency. Ideally, teens will feel safe sharing their emotions and learn lessons they can carry into future relationships. Caso notes that it’s up to adults to lead the way with conscious, continual effort, but that it’s well worth it. The book packs a lot of material into fewer than 200 pages; as a result, it can feel disjointed at times, with some passages, such as the one addressing gender expression, only skimming the surface of its topic. That said, the guide provides readers with concrete steps to take, backed by solid, cited research, and it does so in a conversational manner that’s consistently positive and uplifting. Readers will be encouraged by the insightful questions that close each chapter, which are designed to help readers implement the lessons. However, the author might have considered using boxes and bullet points to break up the text, as solid, unbroken walls of words can be intimidating in a self-help format.
A wide-ranging guide to understanding and cultivating better relationships with teenagers.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2024
ISBN: 9781635769364
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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