How to talk so Teens will listen and listen so teens will talk.

Author – Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish

Age Range – 12+

Key words – Parenting teenagers

This is a book for parents of teenagers, (but the principles apply widely). The book gives parents strategies for communicating with their teenagers to address some of the more common areas of conflict. The authors have written the book based on their experiences of running communication workshops. They have written a series of books that are aimed at helping adults to improve how they communicate with children and young people and manage different issues.

The book talks the reader through various themes, for example dealing with feelings, discipline, problem solving and sex and drugs. Each chapter starts with easy to read descriptions of the strategies followed by cartoons to illustrate the ideas. Each chapter then describes the experiences of some parents that have attended the workshops followed by a handy summary at the end of the chapter. The book is easy to read and the short chapters, cartoons and summaries make it a useful book to keep around to pick up in rare spare moments.

The book uses American language that can be hard to get past and it doesn’t go into some of the reasons why parenting teenagers can sometimes be a challenge for parents and being ‘parented’ can sometimes be hard for teenagers. It does, however, give parents some good ideas about how they might go about improving their communication with their teenagers and hopefully improve relationships and find ways of addressing some of the common sources of conflict.