It’s time to face the reality that I’m soon going to have a teenage boy in my house. And then a teenage girl. Then another teenage boy. And another. Then finally another teenage girl, although by that time the first teen boy and girl will both be in their twenties and hopefully out of the house either in some career, college, or branch of the military. That’s getting rather far ahead of myself, but the fact remains that I’d better get used to having teenage boys around. And while I have personal experience with being a teenage boy, I could definitely use some additional perspective.
Enter Teenage Boys: Surviving and Enjoying These Extraordinary Years, the first of what will probably be a number of books I’ll end up reading over the next few years on how to raise up teen boys and teen girls. Originally written in the late early ‘00s (hence the cover of some seriously Xtreme! Teen Boys), this version has been expended with a couple of additional chapters of response material collected by the author Bill Beausay after the publication of the original book.
Overall, it’s a useful book for helping to understand the teenage mind. Again, having been a teen boy, you’d think I’d have a pretty good instinctive understanding of this, but sometimes, that’s just the problem. A lot of what teenagers do is based on instinct, not heavily considered rational processes. It’s one of the big reasons why looking back at their teen years, most people (guys, at least) have a few incidents they can recall that they now preface with “Now I don’t know what I was thinking at the time…” Because we probably weren’t.
The strategies for de-escalation, suggestions for how to establish firm ground rules, and answers to some of the most common parental concerns are especially useful.
The book is also a little bit of a time capsule, having been written just a couple of years before smartphones and social media took over everyone’s lives. Those strategies for firm ground rules, common concerns and de-escalation suddenly seem even more difficult now than they would have been ten years ago, but are more necessary than ever.
The book is written by a Christian, from an Evangelical Christian perspective. As such, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, although it certainly meets me where I live. Still, much of the advice is valuable regardless of what place religion of any sort has in the reader’s home.
Overall, highly recommended for anyone who is, or will soon be parenting a teenage boy.