ABSTRACT
When their children become teenagers, parents may experience demands that they can feel ill-equipped to deal with. Young people themselves are responding to physical, emotional and lifestyle changes that can have a profound impact on them. These challenges, for both parents and young people, have to be faced in the context of major shifts in the last decade in social structures, as well as in political responses to parenting, teenagers and the family (Coleman and Roker 2001). These external factors can exacerbate the internal challenges families are facing. This chapter explores some of these tensions as well as some of the issues resulting from the evaluation of parenting programmes in the UK and in other countries.
