Letting Go with Love and Confidence - by Kenneth Ginsburg & Susan Fitzgerald Paperback

Book Synopsis

A parenting guide to adolescence - a sensible and considerate resource for navigating your teen to adulthood, transforming a traditional time of strife into an opportunity for positive growth for both you and your child.

For parents, nurturing their teens to become healthy, well-adjusted adults seems more challenging now than ever before. There are many pressures for kids to grow up faster than they should. Here, renowned adolescent medicine specialist Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., and award-winning journalist Susan FitzGerald offer parents a practical, thoughtful strategy for guiding children through all the turning points on the way to adulthood - the "whens" and "hows" of adolescence.

Letting Go with Live and Confidence helps parents achieve five goals:

• Manage Their Own Emotions. Many parents are conflicted about their teens growing up. The desire to keep things the way they've always been may get in the way of wise parental decisions. This book addresses the emotional turmoil that surrounds letting go, and urges parents to care for themselves, so they can better care for their children.
  
• Reduce Conflict Around the Whens. It's the everyday "When can I?" questions that trigger many struggles. Parents will learn to turn potential sources of conflict into opportunities for growth as they consider 18 scenarios, including When is my child ready to stay home alone? Get a cell phone? Manage money? Date? Drive?
  
• Minimize Anxiety Over the Hows. Certain subjects are tough to talk about and the stakes in these conversations are high. How in the world do you talk about sex? Drugs? Peer pressure? Parents will learn how to approach critical topics with honesty and clarity, increasing the chances that they'll actually be heard.
  
• Gain Confidence To Make the Right Decisions. Parents reading this book will be better prepared to make decisions because they'll have a strategy to apply to each situation and gain new insight into their child's developmental needs.
  
• Understand That Nurturing Independence Is An Act of Love. The ultimate goal of parenting is to produce a well-adjusted adult. When teens understand that their parents support their independence, they're less likely to rebel. As importantly, when independence is not a battle, families can move toward lifelong interdependence.

  Letting Go with Live and Confidence is filled with the latest findings on successful parenting and is infused with Dr. Ginsburg's expert advice on how to build resilience in teens. This comprehensive volume also contains stories from real parents from diverse backgrounds who have faced the challenges of raising teens. Empowering and groundbreaking, this book is a one-stop resource to parenting teens in the twenty-first century.

Review Quotes

"An eminently readable, down-to-earth, and spot-on book...You'll end up feeling that Ginsburg is sitting right in your living room (and wishing he were!), handing out wise, practical advice, reminding you that there is so much more right with your teen than wrong. Letting Go with Love and Confidence is likely to end up being your teen years bible." -- Madeline Levine, Ph.D., author of The Price of Privilege

"A wonderful guide...refreshingly up-to-date and down to earth. Dr. Ginsburg is deeply respectful of both parents and teenagers." -- Wendy Mogel, Ph.D., author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee

"Ginsburg (pediatrics & adolescent medicine, Children's Hosp. of Philadelphia) sticks to the "seven C's" he outlined in his well-regarded Building Resilience in Children and Teens and shows how a sense of competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control leads to healthy outcomes for both parent and teen. Here, he centers on the adolescent years and charts out five goals for parents: managing emotions around letting go, reducing conflict, minimizing anxiety, becoming confident in your parenting ability, and understanding that nurturing independence is an act of love. His style is pleasant and concise and, while 30 chapters and 350-plus pages on teenagers may sound like Gitmo to some readers, his advice will be of great value to parents who stick with his program. Recommended." -- Library Journal

About the Author

Kenneth Ginsburg, M.D., M.S.Ed., is a pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine at The Children's Hospital in Philadelphia and an expert on parenting teens. Regularly voted a "Top Doc" by Philadelphia magazine, he speaks across the country and lives in Philadelphia with his wife and two teenage daughters.

Susan Fitzgerald is an award-winning journalist. She lives outside Philadelphia.