Breakthrough Years: A New Scientific Framework for Raising Thriving Teens

Blending cutting-edge research with engaging storytelling, the author offers readers a paradigm-shifting comprehensive understanding of adolescence. Illustrations.
"Blending cutting-edge research with engaging storytelling, The Breakthrough Years offers readers a paradigm-shifting comprehensive understanding of adolescence. Almost every adolescent has said to parents, "You JUST don't understand." In The Breakthrough Years, child development expert Ellen Galinsky explains why that is so often true. Galinsky's seven-year inquiry into the adolescent brain and behavior, including conducting original studies-uniquely informed by the questions adolescents have about their own development-shows why our understanding of adolescence is out of step with the latest research-and how to correct it. She: Identifies Five Basic Needs-such as belonging, developing competence, and building an identity-and show how we can meet these needs in positive ways; Presents Five Life Skills that are developing rapidly during adolescence like setting goals and strategies, perspective taking, critical thinking, and taking on challenges and shows how we can promote them; Introduces Solutions Mindset and Shared Solutions, a problem-solving mindset and process that parents and others can use to help create solutions to their adolescent's challenging problems. Ellen Galinsky's paradigm-shifting book will help parents and those who work with teens to understand adolescence not as the "I hope we can get though these years" but as the breakthrough years that they truly can be"--
Blending cutting-edge research with engaging storytelling, The Breakthrough Years offers readers a paradigm-shifting comprehensive understanding of adolescence.“Just wait until they’re a teenager!”Many parents of newborns have heard this warning about the stressful phase that’s to come. But what if it doesn’t have to be that way?Child development expert Ellen Galinsky challenges widely held assumptions about adolescents and offers new ways for parents and others to better understand and interact with them in a way that helps them thrive.By combining the latest research on cognitive neuroscience with an unprecedented and extensive set of studies of young people nine through nineteen and their families, Galinsky reveals, among other things, that adolescents don’t want to separate completely from their parents but seek a different type of relationship; that they want to be helpers rather than be helped; and that social media can become a positive influence for teens.Galinsky’s Shared Solutions framework and Possibilities Mindset show you how to turn daily conflicts into opportunities for problem-solving where both teens and parents feel listened to and respected; how to encourage positive risk-taking in your child like standing up for themselves, making new friends, and helping their communities; and how to promote five essential executive function–based skills that can help them succeed now and in the future.The Breakthrough Years recasts adolescence as a time of possibility for teens and adults, offering breakthrough opportunities for connection.