Ebook: Your Teenager: Thinking About Your Child During the Secondary School Years

The three books collected here in one volume were first published in 1969 as part of a complete year-by-year series on child development written by therapists from the Tavistock Clinic. The purpose of the series was to describe for parents the normal features and problems encountered in bringing up children from birth onwards. Martha Harris was unusually well qualified to write the books on the secondary school years, owing to her experience and training as teacher, teacher-trainer, psychoanalyst, and her position as head of the training of child psychotherapists in the Child and Family unit at the Tavistock for many years. She also co-operated with her husband Roland Harris―head of an inner-city comprehensive school―in pioneering a schools counselling service; and in addition to her direct professional experience she had teenage children at the time of writing these books.

The books offer practical guidance in all the compartments of school and family life―friends, brothers and sisters, studies, leisure interests, together with the problem areas of harmful or anti-social behavior. These are set in the context of the mental and physical development of children in these growth-spurt years. In particular, parents are helped to consider imaginatively the impact of the teenager’s life at school, where most of their time is spent, yet which can frequently be a closed book to parents once their child has moved on from primary education.