Escaping the Endless Adolescence by Joseph Allen & Claudia Worrell Allen

231 pages

"Do you sometimes wonder how your teen is ever going to survive on his or her own as an adult? Does your high school junior seem oblivious to the challenges that lie ahead? Does your academically successful nineteen-year-old still expect you to 'just take care of' even the most basic life tasks?

Welcome to the stunted world of the Endless Adolescence. Recent studies show that today's teenagers are more anxious and stressed and less independent and motivated to grow up than ever before. Twenty-five is rapidly becoming the new fifteen for a generation suffering from a debilitating 'failure to launch.' Now two preeminent clinical psychologists tell us why and chart a groundbreaking escape route for teens and parents.

Drawing on their extensive research and practice, Joseph Allen and Claudia Worrell Allen show that most teen problems are not hardwired into teens' brains and hormones but grow instead out of a 'Nurture Paradox' in which our efforts to support our teens by shielding them from the growth-spurring rigors and rewards of the adult world have backfired badly. With compelling examples and practice and profound suggestions, the authors outline a novel approach for producing dramatic leaps forward in teen mature, including

• Turn Consumers into Contributors. Help teens experience adult maturity--its bumps and its joys--through the right kind of employment or volunteer activity.
• Feed Them with Feedback. Let teens see and hear how the larger world perceives them. Shielding them from criticism--constructive or otherwise--will only leave them unequipped to deal with it when they get to the 'real world.'
• Provide Adult Connections. Even though they'll deny it, teens desperately need to interact with adults (including parents) on a more mature level--and such interaction will help them blossom!
• Stretch the Teen Envelope. Do fewer things for teens that they can do for themselves, and give them tasks just beyond their current level of competence and comfort.

Today's teens are starved for the lost fundamentals they need to really grow: adult connections and the adult rewards of autonomy, competence, and mastery. Restoring these will help them unlearn their adolescent helplessness and grow into adults who can make you--and themselves--proud." -Dust Jacket

I thought I'd get a jump start on this since I have a soon-to-be thirteen-year-old and I would like her to be a capable adult someday. I also want to be a capable parent. I thought this book was very well written. It wasn't full of technical/scientific terms but was written for the average parent. I liked the examples it gave with different teens. Object lessons are always good for me. I found myself agreeing with so much of what was said and suggested and I learned a lot that I'm anxious to try. Some of the tidbits I took away from this were:

• Rather than just giving everything to our teens we need to ask some things of our teens. The Nurture Paradox is that we try so hard to give them everything we think will make them happy, that we don't want them to be deprived of material things like we were, that we nurture them with the wrong things. The authors suggest that doing this is like "poisoning their character just as surely as an excess of sugar and fat in their diets can poison their bodies." "Larry and Megan came from quite different neighborhoods and backgrounds. But what both of their parents shared was the unstated assumption that good parenting is reflected in what we provide our children, rather than in what we expect from them."
• "Our ultimate goal with our teens shouldn't be to get them into a good college, but rather to have them learn to be successful on their own in their future lives." (They talk a lot about the education of young people in this country and how it fails them to a large extent. Too much emphasis and stress are placed on college admissions, rather than on teaching young people how to navigate the adult world. They also give some interesting alternatives.) "Bending over backward to get one's child into a good college will not matter nearly as much as preparing them to function independently and to thrive once they are there."
• Doing work that matters to someone helps teens on their way to escaping the Endless Adolescence. They need to feel needed and doing work that makes a difference in the adult world.
• Teens need to be socialized by adults and not by their peers.
• "Freedom should be linked to behavior" and not to age requirements.
• We need to provide our teens with a support system (referred to as "scaffolding") so they can learn lessons but with support from us. 
• "Adults are the relationship maintainers with teens."
• "Adults should use the same conventions of respect and politeness when talking with teens that we use when talking to other adults." We should not speak to them condescendingly or always criticize. We should make sure that we have specific time with teens where there is no criticism given, we just talk with them.
• "Adolescents, for all their good intentions, are not adults in terms of their relationship skills." They quite often lack the conversation skills that adults have acquired and we need to be careful not to judge their behaviors based on an adult skill set.
• "Again and again, however, we pass up opportunities to allow our teens the experience of mastery, usually in the mistaken notion that we are nurturing them and showing them love by doing things for them." We need to take the time to teach them how to do things that are within their capacity and slightly challenge them.
• "The best feedback comes not from parents but from the real world." We need to remove the middleman--us. They give the example of taking our teens with us to parent-teacher conference so they can hear first-hand what needs improvement and what they're doing well.
• "Teens are built for physical activity, and with enough of it, will function better in all areas of life."
• The +/- 5 rule: sometimes our teens act 5 years old than they are...and sometimes they act 5 years younger.

There are definitely several things I can work on now that I think will make a huge difference, especially the one about speaking to our teens with the same respect and politeness that we do with other adults, and not being condescending or too critical. Sometimes I am too hard on my kids. I'm also excited to help my daughters do more for themselves. I've never been the mom who gives my kids everything they want. I make them earn money for the things that they really want. My middle daughter summed it up in my Mother's Day card this year: "You give me what I need and sometimes what I want." I think a lot of these suggestions will help my relationship with my daughters.