Letting Go with Love and Confidence

Raising Responsible, Resilient, Self-Sufficient Teens in the 21st Century

A parenting guide to adolescence - a sensible and considerate resource for navigating your teen to adulthood, transforming a traditional time of strife into an opportunity for positive growth for both you and your child.

For parents, nurturing their teens to become healthy, well-adjusted adults seems more challenging now than ever before. There are many pressures for kids to grow up faster than they should. Here, renowned adolescent medicine specialist Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., and award-winning journalist Susan FitzGerald offer parents a practical, thoughtful strategy for guiding children through all the turning points on the way to adulthood - the "whens" and "hows" of adolescence.

Letting Go with Live and Confidence helps parents achieve five goals:

• Manage Their Own Emotions. Many parents are conflicted about their teens growing up. The desire to keep things the way they've always been may get in the way of wise parental decisions. This book addresses the emotional turmoil that surrounds letting go, and urges parents to care for themselves, so they can better care for their children.

• Reduce Conflict Around the Whens. It's the everyday "When can I?" questions that trigger many struggles. Parents will learn to turn potential sources of conflict into opportunities for growth as they consider 18 scenarios, including When is my child ready to stay home alone? Get a cell phone? Manage money? Date? Drive?

• Minimize Anxiety Over the Hows. Certain subjects are tough to talk about and the stakes in these conversations are high. How in the world do you talk about sex? Drugs? Peer pressure? Parents will learn how to approach critical topics with honesty and clarity, increasing the chances that they'll actually be heard.

• Gain Confidence To Make the Right Decisions. Parents reading this book will be better prepared to make decisions because they'll have a strategy to apply to each situation and gain new insight into their child's developmental needs.

• Understand That Nurturing Independence Is An Act of Love. The ultimate goal of parenting is to produce a well-adjusted adult. When teens understand that their parents support their independence, they're less likely to rebel. As importantly, when independence is not a battle, families can move toward lifelong interdependence.

  Letting Go with Live and Confidence is filled with the latest findings on successful parenting and is infused with Dr. Ginsburg's expert advice on how to build resilience in teens. This comprehensive volume also contains stories from real parents from diverse backgrounds who have faced the challenges of raising teens. Empowering and groundbreaking, this book is a one-stop resource to parenting teens in the twenty-first century.