ABSTRACT
The clinical psychologist Nigel Latta begins his book on managing adolescents with an anecdote about a thirteen-year-old girl who had “approached an elderly woman in a supermarket car park and told her to get out of her car . . . grabbed her, pulled her out, put her in a headlock, and started to punch her” (7). This is an extreme example designed perhaps to put parents’ problems in perspective, but it is illustrative of the premise of the book, that parents need coping strategies to “get out alive” from what Latta presents as a “battlefi eld” (13). Teenagers, after all, “do not possess a fully functioning brain” (41) and adolescence should be regarded as a mental illness (38).
