"We had fed the heart on fantasies
The heart's grown brutal from the fare"

W.B. Yeats

In the two years since my previous book, The Good Enough Child: How to Have an Imperfect Family and Be Perfectly Satisfied, was published, I have led hundreds of parenting workshops on the importance of having realistic expectations, both for your children, as well as for yourself, and on how to forgive, accept and love the child that you have, despite all of the ways in which he has, and will, disappoint and disillusion you. During these workshops, participants have always brought up a vast range of childrearing problems, dilemmas and concerns. But I learned early on that I could always count on one particular question popping up at some point in our discussions: "When are you going to write a book on teens?"

Initially, this puzzled me. After all, The Good Enough Child presented within its pages numerous case studies that involved adolescents. And the basic, five-stage process that I developed and explored for readers of that book seemed, to me, to have both relevance and healing powers no matter how old the child was. But in listening to so many mothers and fathers, it soon became clear that the process of seeing your child as "good enough" is, for many reasons, especially daunting when that child becomes an adolescent.

What has also taken place since my previous book was published is that two of my three children have now plunged themselves into the thick of adolescence, and my youngest is poised on the cusp of this same precipice. So I am experiencing the challenges of viewing teens as good enough both from a clinical as well as from a personal perspective, now, and, rest assured, even psychologists can find themselves unnerved and upended at times! Between my patients and my own charges, I confess that I sometimes find that the only explicable thing about adolescents is how thoroughly inexplicable they truly can be.

The reality is that adolescence represents the most dramatic and highly elaborated passage from one developmental realm to another that we will ever encounter. Encompassing ages twelve to eighteen, but often beginning earlier and ending later, no other phase of life is characterized by so much physical and psychological change happening so quickly. And this change affects not only the teen, of course. Just as the lights in your house may dim when a large appliance kicks in, the entire family is affected when your child begins conducting the massive emotional current of adolescence.

In The Good Enough Teen, however, I will show you how to see your child's evolution as a window of opportunity-for you, for your child, and for your entire family. Rather than having you brace for your offspring's adolescence with your eyes shut and your jaw clenched as if it was a buffeting storm that has to be endured, I will help you to understand the often invisible transformation that teens are experiencing, as well as the ways in which your own adolescent experience intimately influences this understanding. In this way, you will find yourself better able to see even your child's most provocative and exasperating behaviors as secret steps in his striving towards maturity, rather than as worrisome signs, chronic problems, or, if nothing else, wretched, mean-spirited efforts designed simply to make us miserable.

As the parent of an adolescent, you will become like Toto in The Wizard of Oz-doggedly tugging away the curtain to display the vulnerable, helpless, but ultimately humane individual who hides behind and operates the complex psychological machinery that so terrifies and intimidates.

Eschewing the quick fixes and easy answers that are likely to lead only to short-term change, if any change at all, I will instead provide numerous strategies that are guaranteed to foster your adolescent's enduring emotional, intellectual, social and moral growth, and show you how to raise him so that he becomes the self-reliant, self-accepting, and self-loving young adult that you can, and deserve to, be proud of.