Reviews for Field Guide To The American Teenager

The average rating for Field Guide To The American Teenager based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-17 00:00:00 Matthew Suarez This very good book covers many of the issues and problems teens deal with today and which are typically dealt with in parenting literature: drugs, drinking and driving, sex, motivation, and the like. It adds a few others to the list: integrity, dealing with death, romantic breakups, etc. In comparison with other parenting-teen books, it admits to much more uncertainty facing parents trying to determine what is going on with their child. I find this aspect of teen-parenting to be perhaps the most unsettling. What also distinguishes this book is its intelligence and depth and its almost forensic approach to the clues and situations that parents must interpret to decide when to intervene in teens' lives. Its premise is that "children live in a different world from the one we knew. They know more. They see more. They are both more grown-up and more vulnerable than we were [...] We try to be like our own parents, but their ways don't always work anymore." For me this book most clearly identified the contradictory stance parents must take in relation to their teenagers: constant vigilance combined with calm and lessened control (a combination that is not easy to maintain). They also stress the importance of open communication (a feat with touchy teens) that builds trust.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-07-06 00:00:00 Rick Fokkens Harrowing book, troubling, but how could the story of one woman's experience with domestic violence not be? What's especially compelling about this book is how the author frames each chapter around one woman's experience and then integrates other research to help make sense of Bernice's life. In this way, I think it might work very well in the undergraduate classroom to bring to life all the complicated parts of domestic violence and give students human, but also empirical, insight into this issue.