Your Teenager: Thinking About Your Child During the Secondary School Years

The Teenager books by Martha Harris, originally published in 1969, take a similar approach to her long-term bestseller Thinking about Infants and Young Children. Rooted vividly in the practicalities of everyday situations, the educational focus is on helping parents use constructively the turbulent emotions that are aroused in them by their child. The structural hinge is her empathy with the struggling child in all of us, and with the difficulty of becoming educated in the deepest and widest sense of that term. If the central task of the adolescent is defined as one of finding their individual identity, then the task of parents is a reciprocal one: it is to re educate themselves through questioning their own relationships, values, emotions and principles. Her aim is that children and parents may make the most of this opportunity to develop in tandem, with a view to ultimately taking their place in the great social class of the truly educated people, the people who are still learning.