Your Teenager

This volume contains Martha Harris’ three short books for parents originally published separately in 1969: Your Eleven-year-old, Your Twelve to Fourteen Year Old and Your Teenager. These books have not dated owing to their focus on helping parents to use constructively the turbulent emotions aroused in them

This volume contains Martha Harris’ three short books for parents originally published separately in 1969 in a series on child development: Your Eleven-year-old; Your Twelve to Fourteen Year Old; and Your Teenager. Rooted vividly in the practicalities of everyday situations, the educational focus is on helping parents use constructively the turbulent emotions that are aroused in them by their child. The structural hinge is her empathy with the struggling child in all of us, and with the difficulty of becoming educated in the deepest and widest sense of that term. If the central task of the adolescent is defined as one of finding their individual identity, then the task of parents is a reciprocal one: it is to re-educate themselves through questioning their own relationships, values, emotions and principles. Her aim is that children and parents may make the most of this opportunity to develop in tandem, with a view to ultimately taking their place in the great social class of the truly educated people, the people who are still learning.

Preface Meg Harris Williams BOOK ONE: YOUR ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD Introduction CHAPTER ONE The eleven-year-old and school Starting secondary school How parents can help The strains of competition and refusal to go to school Edward: feeling lost and deprived of identity Learning and competition Comparison with others When to help Parents' attitudes School discipline: the uses of rules CHAPTER TWO Hobbies and interests Collecting, keeping pets, games Games and character Mark: playing out sibling rivalries Enthusiasms and crazes Anne and her horse book Reading-suspending judgement about the right choice of literature Television and conversation CHAPTER THREE Family relationships Roles in the family Claire: the strain of having to be always good Growing up within the family The need for privacy CHAPTER FOUR Discipline, encouragement, and protection Blaming other people's children and exporting antisocial tendencies Questioning our own attitudes Punishments Criticism, encouragement and praise Why children disobey Steve-his part in representing the school How can we stop children doing things which are harmful to them? CHAPTER FIVE Gratitude, courtesy, and consideration for others Behaviour towards the rest of the family Setting an example: genuine courtesy Religion, where does it come in? Cheating with other children and at school Margaret's divided mind and the significance of "playing fair" CHAPTER SIX Your eleven-year-old and sex Curiosity about sex: a new shyness Unspoken collusion in parents Menstruation: Jenny and its prestige value Masturbation and "wet dreams" Physical changes and appearance CHAPTER SEVEN The need for friends and for time to be alone Conformity with other children Privacy and the 'grown up world' of school Family conflicts and friendships outside the family Elsie's parents become a couple again CHAPTER EIGHT Some eleven-year-olds in difficulty Persistence of childish behaviour Bed-wetting: David expresses an anger he does not know he feels Laziness: Christopher and his mother's inadequate side Trying to understand the child's behaviour difficulties Robert and premature responsibilities BOOK TWO: YOUR TWELVE-FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD Introduction CHAPTER ONE Relationships between parents and teachers Encouraging your young adolescent's grown-up self Taking sides Rachel: collision with the school CHAPTER TWO Enjoying school, expanding interests, and coping with competition Nicola: discovering a personal history Help with homework Work pressures at school The effect of parents' attitudes to success Facing up to failure Ups and downs in feelings about school Atmosphere at home Work and competition CHAPTER THREE School, home, and work Thinking about the future-feeling your way imaginatively Robert: fabricating an answer CHAPTER FOUR Hobbies and interests Play and its meaning Reading and TV The pleasures of discussion Marion's class: free-for-all or playing with ideas? CHAPTER FIVE Family relationships Rivalry goes on Brothers and sisters; can they harm each other's personality? CHAPTER SIX Discipline, encouragement, and protection The help of parental discipline William: asking for safer parents The importance of encouragement Rules, regulations and punishment Pocket money: respect for the child's contribution CHAPTER SEVEN Courtesy and consideration for others Courtesy is mutual Aggression and timorousness Courtesy as an inward growth CHAPTER EIGHT Your young teenager and sex Menstruation Adam: a case of delayed puberty Adolescents' theories about sex Masturbation Sex in books, films and TV Unresolved feelings in parents Protection against sex crimes and sexual promiscuity CHAPTER NINE Friends Ups and downs in friendship Fighting and feeling one's own qualities CHAPTER TEN Bad companions The expression of long hidden aggression The pull to be like the rest The bad influence: the wish to be blamed and absolved Stealing as stealing from mother BOOK THREE: YOUR TEENAGER Introduction CHAPTER ONE The teenager at school Can parents help in the school? Providing special help outside school Can you act as tutor yourself? Preparing the ground by being a learner too Learning with friends Making use of the teacher Irene and the art teacher. Sharing knowledge Getting things into the open On not seeing eye-to-eye Objectives with which we can all agree The teenager enters the adult world The teenager impinges on his parents' world Speaking well When our child does better than his parents CHAPTER TWO Work and further education Growth continues, learning continues Who decides? A decision can be modified Anxieties about work Conflicting expectations Parental pressures The loss of friends Feelings exist, though unexpressed Helping towards independence Being-and feeling-understood Seeing ourselves as others see us On giving advice Time for thought CHAPTER THREE Leisure interests and activities After the party "Will you come and join the dance?" Recreations and their meanings Adolescent driving and road safety Recreation as an escape Recreation as recreation. CHAPTER FOUR Family relationships On being parents of teenagers Disappointment with one's children Parents can help each other adjust to their family's growing-up A teenage girl's view of her parents' marriage How attitudes to parents change Recovery from disillusionment From parental discipline to self-discipline Rosalind: undesirable friendships Changing relationships between brothers and sisters Joanne and Lisa: teenage sisters CHAPTER FIVE The teenager and society Teenage rebellion Politics in the family Society and the internal wars Idealisation of other societies Julia: flight to another country Searching for a cause Richard: flight to apathy and daydreams The anti-social teenager CHAPTER SIX Sex and love The basis of sex enjoyment Identification with the parents' marriage The boy's sexuality The sexual development of the girl Worries about appearance Attitudes to babies Abortion The permissive society Preparation for sex and parenthood Matthew: teenage infatuation Elizabeth: disappointment in love CHAPTER SEVEN Towards finding an identity and living creatively Creativity Changing attitudes Introspection and relating to others The struggle to find an identity First identifications Trying to be sincere Identity realised in work and marriage Fleeing from oneself Jeremy Flight to drugs Jane: changing and resolving identifications Learning to be more objective Teenage impatience and panic about wasted time Fear of the envy of parents and the grown-up world Conquering fears of a malign Fate APPENDIX I - Martha Harris's philosophy of education Meg Harris Williams APPENDIX II - Extracts from A Psychoanalytic Model of the Child-in-the-Family-in-the-Community Donald Meltzer and Martha Harris APPENDIX III - Mattie as Educator Donald Meltzer

• By (author) Martha Harris