Decades ago, back when my kids were just edging into adolescence, my best friend was a fellow single mother. She played cello in an orchestra, which meant she worked nights — orchestras don’t tend to perform at lunchtime — and I often kept her son at my place when she had a gig. He was about two years older than mine. Old enough to start figuring things out.
“I’m about to lose control,” she told me one afternoon, “and he knows it. I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with it.”
Great, I thought. I’m going to be sitting for a kid gone rogue. And he’s going to influence mine.
There was no father in my picture (he being dead) to back me up when these boys woke up to the fact that they could pretty much do whatever they wanted. And what was I going to do about it? Throw a teenager out on the curb?
What I really needed, I decided, was a Navy Seal. Someone trained to give orders that stuck. Someone used to making people in his charge toe the line. My mother, who often watched over my two, couldn’t be expected to ride herd on a feral adolescent. But a guy who’d seen actual combat? A guy who could intimidate without raising his voice? Now we were talking.
Needless to say, the teen years were rough on all of us.
I would be the very last person on earth to dispense parenting advice that didn’t begin with “tried this, wouldn’t recommend.”
Which is why, when I worked with Cecilia and Jason Hilkey and their co-authors on their new book, Raising Teens Who Talk to You: A Connected Parenting Approach to Adolescence, I kept thinking: This. This is the book my girlfriend and I would have devoured by flashlight all those decades ago.
We had no idea, back then, that parenting didn’t have to be one long top-down control operation. That there was a third option between “ground them till they’re forty” and “let the inmates run the asylum.” That withdrawal of privileges and punishment for bad choices were not, in fact, the only tools in the kit.
I also would have given my left buttock to understand what was actually going on inside my kids’ heads at that age. That the teenage brain is a construction site. That impulse control isn’t really online yet, no matter how rational the kid sounded at the dinner table. (And, booyyyyyy, could my two sound rational.) That the spectacularly bad choices my kids occasionally made weren’t an indictment of me as a human being. (Mostly.)
That’s exactly the territory Raising Teens Who Talk to You covers — for parents, grandparents, stepparents, and anyone who loves a tween or teen and would like to keep the relationship intact while doing it.
It’s about letting go without losing connection. (No, those aren’t mutually exclusive, even when it feels like it.) It’s about how to be someone they still want to talk to instead of someone they want to escape — and how to keep the conversations going when the eye rolls hit critical mass. It’s about the inner work of parenting this stage, the way your own adolescence and unfinished business rise up the moment your kid slams a door. It’s about identity and belonging and all the trying-on this messy, magical age requires. It’s about screens and scrolling and what to actually do about the digital firehose your kid is drinking from. It’s about the hard stuff — mental health, risky behavior, heartbreak, academic pressure — and how to show up with presence instead of panic. It’s about repair and trust and boundaries when the relationship itself is being renegotiated in real time. And it’s about having honest conversations about sex and substances without spontaneously combusting on the spot.
In other words, all the things my friend and I were winging on caffeine and tears.
If you’ve got teens now, God bless you, because the obstacle course you’re running is harder than the one we ran. We didn’t have smartphones. We didn’t have social media. We didn’t have 24/7 porn a click away, online predators in our kids’ DMs, or the kind of social isolation that can flower in the middle of a crowded high school cafeteria. Whatever I thought was hard? You’ve got that, plus all of that.
Which is why a book like this matters now in a way it might not have fifteen years ago.
Raising Teens Who Talk to You launches on Amazon Wednesday, May 6. For the first 24 to 48 hours only, the introductory price is $1.99. After that it goes back to its regular price, so if you’ve got a teenager in your life — or one barreling toward you — grab it while it’s the cost of a couple of Tylenol.
You might also buy a stack of them for the parents in your life who are pretending everything is fine and absolutely need this book. Poor buggers.
