Parenting a Teen Girl

Parenting a Teen Girl offers parents effective tips and strategies for understanding the dramatic, confusing highs and lows of adolescence and improving communication with their teenage daughters. Drawn from positive psychology, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and the author's years of experience, the skills in this workbook will help parents guide their daughters past the challenges of adolescence and toward healthier and more productive behaviours.

Key Selling Points:

There are approximately 14 million teen girls in the United States, representing a growing, challenging segment of the therapeutic population. Seventy-four percent of girls say they often feel stressed, and 20% of girls say they do not know three adults to whom they can turn if they have a problem (Girls, Inc., 2006). During adolescence, girls' self-esteem drops twice as much as boys' (Robins, 2002), resulting in high rates of depression, eating disorders, self-injury, and other dangerous behaviours.

This workbook offers parents a crash course in parenting their teenage daughters, complete with skills, exercises, worksheets, and scripts they can use right away to help get defiant behaviour under control. Lucie Hemmen is not only a clinical psychologist who has specialised in working with teenagers for over twenty years, but also the mother of two of her own teen girls.

It's not easy to be a teen girl, but it's even harder to parent one. Parents everywhere struggle to respond appropriately to the defiant behaviour, confrontational or nonexistent communication, and mood swings commonly exhibited by teenage girls. This population faces a unique range of body image issues and psychological vulnerabilities that put them at increased risk for depression, eating disorders, self-injury, anxiety, and mental health conditions.

Written by the mother of two teenage girls who is also a licensed clinical psychologist, Parenting a Teen Girl is a parent's survival guide to navigating this challenging time. This workbook offers parents the skills, exercises, and scripts they need to rebuild communication with their daughters and build the foundation for greater cooperation and connection in the future. Unlike similar books, which merely serve as frightening exposés of bad teen behaviour, this book provides parents with concrete tools and tips they can use right away to decrease their anxiety, increase understanding in the parent-teen relationship, and become more successful in communicating with their teen daughters.

The book includes information on dating, academics, and technology use that will prove immensely helpful to parents.

Author Bio: Lucie Hemmen, PhD, is a licensed clinical psychologist with a private practice in Santa Cruz, CA. For the past twenty years, she has worked with teens, their parents, and their communities to maximise positive support for families raising teenagers. She has two teen daughters, Marley and Daisy, ages 17 and 13.