Publisher's Weekly Review
Youth advocate Shipp (Jump Ship) provides an accessible but superficial primer for helping parents understand and guide their kids through the often confounding adolescent years. With a colloquial and straightforward style, Shipp discusses major developmental phases and challenges common to young adults ages 12-18. He says this account is backed up by the work of "an incredible team of researchers, psychologists, and scientists," few of whom are actually mentioned in the text. Shipp addresses an array of typical problems faced by adolescents, including issues with communication, drugs, trust, dangerous behavior, screen time, school, and sex, each one accompanied by simple and logical action steps. A former at-risk foster child himself, Shipp seems to orient this book to parents of "problem" kids, declaring that no matter how troubled, "every kid is one caring adult away from being a success story." Full of sound bites ("What you don't talk out, you act out"), lists ("The Seven Things Every Teen Needs to Hear"), and other refrigerator-magnet-like reminders, this book reads like a transcript from one of Shipp's public-speaking gigs. Parents will find more substantive info in Frances Jensen's The Teenage Brain on why teens act the way they do, as well as better advice and less hype. Agent: Erin Niumata, Folio Literary. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
THE BIGGEST HOLIDAY of the year for parents is not Thanksgiving or Christmas or Mother's Day or Father's Day. It's the day in September your kid goes back to school - or, as I call it, "Tag, You're It!" day. Very soon, for six sweet hours, five delicious days a week, we hand our children over to the loving ministrations of someone who isn't us. As that glorious day nears, this might be a good opportunity to look at a recent crop of books about parenting. How did you do this summer? Yeah, I know. Me too. Thomas Armstrong's THE MYTH OF THE A.D.H.D. CHILD: 101 Ways to Improve Your Child's Behavior and Attention Span Without Drugs, Labels, or Coercion (TarcherPerigee, paper, $17) is a revised edition of a book that was first published more than 20 years ago, but it is still timely for the many parents who struggle with a question at the beginning of every school year: To medicate or not to medicate? According to the Centers for Disease Control, approximately 11 percent of children in the United States between the ages of 4 and 17 have received a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Prescriptions for stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall have increased steadily since the 1990s, with sales of A.D.H.D. medications projected in one study to reach $17.5 billion by 2020. While hyperactivity does exist, Armstrong says, educators and parents expect too much calm from our kids too soon, and as a result we pathologize normal child behavior, particularly boy behavior. As someone who was once vehemently antidrug, I have seen firsthand how medication can change a child's life ("I imagine this is what it's like to feel normal," my son said, after trying Adderall). Nor do I think drugs are a shortterm solution that necessarily leads to acting-out and selfloathing. Quite the opposite: I've seen medication break the shame spiral that comes with doing badly in school because a child is unable to pay attention, even to subjects he or she enjoys. Nevertheless, medication should be a last resort, and "The Myth of the A.D.H.D. Child" provides many excellent alternative strategies. My teenage son's favorite: "Use Touch to Soothe and Calm." "Can we enlist Maria Sharapova for that one?" he asked hopefully. Don't be misled by the title of Sarah Ockwell-Smith's GENTLE DISCIPLINE (TarcherPerigee, paper, $16). It's not "Fifty Shades of Lite Grey"; it's the latest in her series of popular books in the "gentle" genre. The subtitle, "Using Emotional Connection - Not Punishment - to Raise Confident, Capable Kids," is the giveaway. (Side note: Why do parenting books encourage such blabby subtitles?) Her methodology is not about being permissive, she insists. Rather, it's about good planning, "mutual respect and working with children, not against them." She details the many reasons kids behave badly, and her parenting philosophy can be summed up in this observation: "If you want kids to behave better, you have to make them feel better." We need to become like great schoolteachers, she says, figuring out how our children learn in order to help them grow. Very true. But Ockwell-Smith, who has four children herself, is a solemn teacher, and there's something a little exhausting about the methods proposed in this book. It's never enough to praise a good job; what is it about that job that's good? Ockwell-Smith likes specificity, and she has many strongly held ideas about cutting corners. For example, she believes distracting a little kid is a bad discipline tool, because it "prevents children from feeling, expressing and, therefore, managing emotions. . . . You prevent them from discovering that emotions are O.K." That sounds good, but I am not going to let my kid explore his emotional landscape in the middle of a Wal-Mart, over my refusal to buy the Fisher-Price Power Wheels. I am going to give him a couple of M&M's and get the hell out of there. The subtitle of IGNORE IT! (TarcherPerigee, paper, $16) is "How Selectively Looking the Other Way Can Decrease Behavioral Problems and Increase Parenting Satisfaction," or, when translated into my vernacular, "How Locking Yourself in Your Room With a Vodka Gimlet and Reruns of Comey's Testimony Can Make You a Better Parent." The family therapist Catherine Pearlman is not suggesting we la-la-la our way through all behavioral issues: If your child is engaging in unsafe or injurious behaviors, it's time to act. But she believes that some of the most annoying kid problems can be snuffed out once a parent acknowledges one of the unwritten rules of parenting: To a child, there is no such thing as "bad" attention. Screaming and shouting from a parent is better than no attention at all. She discusses the scourge of helicopter parenting, and how we have essentially turned our kids into a nation of tiny Willy Lomans, to whom Attention Must Be Paid. To extinguish irritating behavior and encourage the good stuff, Pearlman suggests parents look at their children the way B. F. Skinner looked at pigeons, using his theory that "what happened immediately following an action would determine if that action would be repeated." The less you react to whining and tantrums, the more quickly kids will figure out another tactic that works - say, niceness. The very fact that someone has felt the need to write a book on how to discuss the president of the United States with children - as if he were an illegal substance, or an S.T.D. - says more about the times we're living in than the particulars of the parenting tips given here. HOW DO I EXPLAIN THIS TO MY KIDS? Parenting in the Age of Trump (New Press, paper, $15.95), edited by Sarah Swong and Diane Wachtell, with commentary by Ava Siegler, is part series of essays, part collection of earnest advice. Writer-parents - including those who are gay, Muslim, Jewish and nonwhite - grapple with the question they say their kids are asking, which is essentially: Why does our new president hate us? This book isn't politically evenhanded, nor was it meant to be, but I did particularly enjoy one essay by a teacher, Molly Knefel, who writes that kids are talking about politics in school like never before - possibly because Potus "speaks in threats that a 7-year-old can understand." We should have never heard of Josh Shipp, if the story he tells about himself in THE GROWN-UP'S GUIDE TO TEENAGE HUMANS: How to Decode Their Behavior, Develop Unshakable Trust, and Raise a Respectable Adult (HarperWave, $26.99, to be published in September) is any indication. As a child in the foster care system, Shipp kept a log of his placements that detailed how quickly he was kicked out for bad behavior. It was usually pretty quick. Then, at 14, he was placed with a guy named Rodney. Rodney, a history teacher and middleschool football coach, knew of Shipp's past, and he became the lucky recipient of Shipp's greatest hits: shoplifting, getting drunk at school, passing bad checks. Shipp couldn't get Rodney to kick him out. Finally, after one particularly egregious incident that involved Rodney bailing him out of jail, Rodney sat him down and said: "You gotta get it through your thick head, son. We don't see you as a problem. We see you as an opportunity." Hearing this was the turning point in Shipp's life. His acquired street wisdom commands our attention as he gives us advice about dealing with our teenagers. "What kids don't talk out, they will act out," he says. Shipp is a motivational speaker and the founder of the youth empowerment group Kids These Days, and his most important premise, supported by research, is a little counterintuitive: No matter how your child behaves, his or her biggest concern is not being able to spend time with you. (Though I think my own son's biggest concern is that I will start dancing in front of his friends.) While Shipp's "pay attention always" approach may seem to contradict Pearlman's "ignore" edict, it really doesn't: They are complementary approaches to kids at different stages of life. Shipp talks about how the job of a parent shifts as a child ages from being an "air traffic controller," essentially having control of every aspect of that kid's life, to being a coach. How to create trust and mutual respect is the meat of this book. Mostly it involves doing stufftogether, never bailing on a promise (outside of a dire emergency) and teaching selfgovernance. Make no mistake, Shipp says: "Teens who are in trouble really, truly, do want to get caught." Shipp is an adult now, but he speaks from the point of view of a teenager, and his book resonates deeply. "The Grown-Up's Guide" also contains some amazing stories of adults handling unimaginably horrific situations. Shipp describes foster parents taking in a 10-year-old whose meth-addict parents had been prostituting him for drug money: How exactly do you turn that around? But the foster parents did. Inspiration doesn't have to be grand or fancy. Sometimes it's a simple idea that leaves you with goose bumps: A kid's life can be transformed by a caring adult who's just a little bit more bullheaded than the kid. JUDITH NEWMAN'S "To Siri With Love: A Mother, Her Autistic Son, and the Kindness of Machines" will be published this month. Her column appears every eight weeks.
