Adolescents Books

Eirini Flouri is affilated with the Centre for Research into Parenting and Children at the University of Oxford and lecturer in Statistics at St Hilda's College with an interest in human development and since the year 2000 she has researched the role of the father in parenting.
As an example of this new trend into fathering the National Center for Fathering (www.fathers.com) was established in Kansas City in 1990 in order that every child should have an involved father or father figure, so that children would not be unfathered. It is true that "fathering" has become a hot issue in human development research, but in fact we are talking about a recovery of awareness and not something unprecedented as discussed in the book by Eli Newberger (The men they will become. The nature and nurture of male character. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publ, 1999). Here it is documented that English and American fathers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were active in all aspects of domestic life, from monitoring their wives' pregnancies to taking responsibility for the daily socialization of their children, but in the nineteenth century fathers were somehow displaced from the center of the family circle and only recognized through the expression of a paycheck.
This book is based on more than 20 studies performed by the author in the United Kingdom using five different data sources spanning a time period of more than 40 years with an international review of studies in the field of the role of the father in child development.
This is a scholarly book with important research that will serve as a reference in this field. Her studies showed that father involvement was sometimes associated with "good" children's (career maturity in adolescence, labour force participation, state benefits receipt and subsidised housing in adult life) outcome and sometimes unrelated. Father involvement was associated with low risk for delinquincy in sons (but not in daughters), father interest in child education was related to daughter's (but not son's) educational attainment in adult life and father involvement protected against experience of homelessness in adult sons (but not in daughets) from low (but not high) socio-economic groups.

Gideon Vardi, MD, MPH
Zusman Child Development Center, Division of Pediatrics, Faculty of Health Sciences, Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva, Israel. E-mail: GideonVa@clalit.org.il

Prrofessor Joav Merrick, MD
Director, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and Medical director, Division for Mental Retardation, Box 1260, IL-91012 Jerusalem, Israel. E-mail: jmerrick@internet-zahav.net

Fighting The Good Fight: One Family's Struggle Against Adolescent Alcoholism by psychiatrist Victoria C. G. Greenleaf is the emotional and candidly personal description of her own family's desperate struggle to cope with her son David's addiction, its consequences, and a very difficult intervention. Candidly told and vividly described, Fighting The Good Fight is a profound and informative account which is especially recommended reading for anyone having to cope with the problems of adolescent addiction within their own family.

For The Sake of The Children is a must read for all parents whoare entering into a divorce and aren't getting along. This book helpsthe reader learn to look at how the children see things rather than the way the situation makes the parent feel. This book teaches the reader that it's important to try to see each situation through the child's eyes and not concern ones self with what the ex or soon to be ex is doing right or wrong, but to focus on your own reactions. After all that is all you can control! I cannot recommend it highly enough!

Excellent book on forgiveness. Fascinating findings in the research conducted by Dr. Beth. Highly recommend this book.

A well written, well researched book that clearly explains the need for phonemic awareness in literacy acquisition. Whether you're a parent or teacher this is a "must read". Don't let Byrne's history put you off either - he might be a psychology lecturer, but this is written in such a way that you don't need a psyc background to understand it.

I found this book to be useful and informative with regard to adolescent therapy. It is interesting to read and provides case studies. I would recommend this book to those who are interested in adolescent therapy.

Baldwin's most important theoretical legacy is the concept of the Baldwin Effect or Baldwinian evolution. Baldwin proposed, against Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, that there is a mechanism whereby epigenetic factors come to shape the genome as much as-or more than-natural selection pressures. In particular, human behavioural decisions made and sustained across generations as a set of cultural practices ought to be considered among the factors shaping the human genome.

Although relatively obscure in his time, Baldwin's contribution to this field places him at the heart of contemporary controversies in the fields of Evolutionary psychology and wider Sociobiology.


Apart from articles in the Psychological Review, he has written:

Handbook of Psychology (1890), translation of Ribot's, German Psychology of To-day (1886);
Elements of Psychology (1893);
Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development (1898);
Story of the Mind (1898);
Mental Development in the Child and the Race (1896);
Thought and Things (London and New York, 1906).
He also largely contributed to the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (1901-1905), of which he was editor in-chief.

In his book Integral Psychology, Ken Wilber refers to Baldwin as a fore-runner of Wilber's theory of Integral Psychology.

As a huge Ken Wilber fan, I found Baldwins works to be of great importance to my understanding of much of today's current thought. Read him and you will know what I mean!

Filled with insight and wisdom, 'Free the Children' is most unique and original in its own sense, yet equal in rank to the works of Carlos Castaneda and Don Miguel Ruiz. This beautifully written story is about a love shared between a father and son. Yet, it is not about a father 'fathering' a son. Quite the opposite - Boye, with an innocent wisdom that has not been distorted by the conventional impositions of social institutions, teaches, or better yet, 'boys' a Father. Bruce Scott reclaims and liberates his own lost innocent self as he and Boye travel the country, meeting up with bizarre people in the most uncanny places, and sharing profound experiences that bring about a shift in awareness and alters their way of seeing and being in the world. One of the scenes that remain with me is when Bruce is trying to convince Boye that he needs to become free of a certain belief that supposedly has him imprisoned. Eight or nine-year-old Boye simply explains to his father that all is well in his world, and instead it is Bruce who must become free. Then, turning on a dime, Boye shifts back to the wonder of living in the moment, in search of an ice cream or a handful of candy. In other words, Boye is fine just as he is, and by remaining true to this inner wisdom and innocence, and speaking his truth, he forces his father back upon self, where he must face his own trauma and not hand it off to his son to be redeemed. 'Free the Children' has a dream-like quality and reads like a fine piece of literature as opposed to the many modern day self-help books. If you are looking for concrete answers and direction in life... well, you'll be hard pressed to find such things in this publication. However, 'Free the Children' has the potential to lead us back to our own original voices that may well have been lost years ago when we learned to say 'yes' to social impositions and false belief systems, and 'no' to our authentic selves.

I feel the author is a true example of how we can show others God's love. He shares his joys and tragedies in working with those caught in substance abuse. This book is not only for those who suffer from addiction, but also for the friends and family of that person who wish to truly help the addict become a disciple of Christ. It is a book that is easy to read with small chapters that include some key questions and statements that many can relate to. This book also sends hope to the reader and helps them find Jesus in them. Excellent Book!!!!

I hope that the idea that an embryo has no feelings, that a fetus is just a blank slate-in-the-making is fast fading from society's belief systems. But just in case some of us still don't think we can influence a baby till it's born, take a lok at "From Fetus to Child," by psychoanalyst A. Piontelli. She sat day after day with obstetricians watching for an hour at a time how fetuses behaved in the womb. Her camera was a sonogram, peering into the uterine world to discover the truth about prenatal life.

Though she is a highly educated researcher and practicing analyst and psychotherapist, Dr. Piontelli writes in a style almost as easy to follow as a newspaper human interest story, with few technical words to stumble over.

One could not stumble past her eye-witness accounts of fetus after fetus, which became single or twin births and demonstrated with no doubt remaining how the earliest developmental stage studied was mirrored by the behavior of newborn, toddler, and up to the four-year-old, her age limit to study.

Nature vs nurture is studied in action. And some of each appears to contribute to the behavior of the children as they grow.

Expectant parents, health care workers, midwives... Here's a book I'd highly recommend.