Ah, you lucky ducks! You get to be the parents of teenagers! I don’t have to worry about that for another three years, but I can feel it looming over me, like the ticking of a clock, or maybe the timer on a bomb.
I think it’s pretty safe to say that the teenage years are the very hardest. In addition to puberty and driving and the introduction of drugs and all that other fun stuff, your child has to go through a growth spurt which is a growth of the mind. They are trying to decide what they think about the world around them, and how they are going to interact with that world. They are trying to determine who they are as people, and what they want out of their lives. They can and will take examples from you as their parents, but they don’t want to be limited. They’ll listen to friends, teachers, TV, and books as they decide what they are going to think and how they are going to act.
This is where literature comes in. As your teenager reads, he is given information that will be stored deep in the brain, to resurface when needed or when least expected. The more positive, encouraging information he can store, the more he’ll have to rely on later.
Sadly, many of the books currently on the market for our young adult readers contain sexual innuendo, display hatred for parents or intolerance of school, and carry the message that whatever you want to do is fine, as long as it makes you happy. What’s even more unfortunate is that some of these books are required reading in junior high and high school.
However, there are a great many fabulous works of young adult literature that can help to offset some of these negative messages they are getting and provide some balance.
As I continue to review books here on families.com, be sure to keep your eyes open for books specifically marked young adult. While these books are certainly good for adults as well (I enjoyed them quite a bit) they are books that you can recommend to your teenager to help round out their reading menu. The more we can encourage our teenagers to look at the positive and give them the tools to do so, the more they’ll be able to stand up to the negative when it makes itself felt.