Untangled

This was extremely useful for me as a parent of a 14-year-old girl who just started high school. My kid is bright, beautiful, and very capable, but she still struggles enough to make us worry for her. This book really illuminates how being a teenage girl is inherently a struggle, and really your daughter needs to experience some turmoil, baffling swings in maturity and judgment, love-hate parental interactions, friendship drama, skepticism of authority, and other challenging stuff. This is part of the work of becoming a self-sufficient, healthy adult.

I appreciate this focus on normal development and the fact that normal can look and feel so irrational and scary sometimes. Raising a daughter can feel so frightening, overwhelming, and even depressing. It's quite consoling to be reminded that this is a crazy, hard time for just about every girl. Even in areas where I finished a chapter and said, “Yeah, I was already knocking it out of the park on that!” it was nice to have reassurance!

While the focus is on normal development, each section has a brief discussion of warning signs that your kid is outside the bell curve and could use some intervention. It's nice to have that barometer for the moments when you wonder if you need to bring in help.

I would say this book is worth picking up just for three key takeaways that have stuck with me: the metaphor of parent-as-pool-edge (sometimes she needs to be able to hold onto you, and sometimes she needs to push off away from you), the explanation of externalization of negative emotions (kid unconsciously finds a way to make YOU feel the anxiety or upset she can't cope with), and the Veil of Obedience (certain parental behaviors are more likely to inspire a nod-and-smile response where none of your precious wisdom gets taken seriously).

I thought this did fairly well on the “woke” front: it includes LGBTQ+ relationships in its treatment of romance, leaves a neutral door open on how to talk about your particular values surrounding alcohol, drugs, and sex without assuming what those values are, and though there's a brief mention of the supposed danger of obesity, the overall thrust is quite skeptical of dieting and good about emphasizing girls' bodies as vehicles for their own fulfillment rather than pretty objects.