Adolescence Is Not a Disease: Beyond Drinking, Drugs, and Dangerous Friends: The Journey to Adulthood

HOW TO PREPARE YOUR TEEN TO SUCCEED IN A COMPLEX WORLD There are so many influences on teens and young adults today, the flood is impossible to control. Often, teens' questions about themselves and their futures are too much for parents to handle alone, or worse, go unnoticed and unanswered. The consequence of ignoring these can lead to decades of unnecessary struggle. Adolescence Is Not a Disease offers innovative, real-life, real-world solutions to problems both parents and teens face. Internationally recognized mentor, Jeffrey Leiken, explains the three distinct stages of the deep and complex inner journey each teen goes through in becoming a self-sufficient adult, and how you can help your teens answer their most urgent and challenging questions and move toward fulfilling adulthoods. Leiken shares themes, struggles, and solutions almost all teens and their parents face, highlighting the differences between coming-of-age in the twenty-first century, while honoring the universal constants that we all went through. Leiken poignantly discourages parents from blindly deferring to the pervasive, contemporary, one-dimensional, feardriven "expert advice" that too often pathologizes adolescence, misunderstands it, and creates the problems it then tries (and mostly fails) to fix. Rather than try to become an expert in parenting, Leiken will help you to instead become an expert in raising your own.