Richard M. Lerner

For many parents the thought of the teen years holds more dread than all the sleepless nights of infancy and scraped knees of childhood combined. After all, teens are obstinate, inconsiderate, and defiant; they sulk and stress; they are prone to bad decisions and unreasonable behavior. Given the option, most parents would happily skip the storms of adolescence and move right in to the relative calm of young adulthood if they could. Who can blame them when popular wisdom tells them that their lovable twelve-year-old will be replaced by an unpredictable, emotional volcano at the age of thirteen? Although the word teenager has become synonymous with trouble, the evidence is clear: Adolescents have a bad rap--and according to groundbreaking new research, it's an undeserved one. In The Good Teen, Richard Lerner lays bare compelling new data on the lives of teens today, dismantling old myths and redefining normal adolescence.Time and again his work reveals that in spite of the stereotypes, today's teens are basically good kids who maintain healthy relationships with their families. Overflowing with real-life anecdotes and cutting-edge science, The Good Teen encourages new thinking, new public policies, and new programs that focus on teens' strengths.Every teen, whatever their ability or background, has the same potential for healthy and successful development. In The Good Teen, Lerner presents the five personality characteristics, called the 5 Cs, that are proven to fuel positive development: Competence, Confidence, Connection, Character, and Caring. When the 5 Cs coalesce, a sixth emerges, Contribution: where young people contribute to their own development in an energetic and optimistic way. He also prescribes specific ways parents can foster the 5 Cs at home and in their communities.From the Hardcover edition.

"Family Diversity and Family Policy describes the dimensions of diversity which characterize the contemporary American family and discusses the implications for public policy and associated intervention programs linked to this diversity. The authors contend that if the programs and policies available to support families are to be maximally useful, they need to reflect the diversity of the families they intend to help."--BOOK JACKET.

Our nation's youth are at risk for drug and alcohol abuse, unsafe sexual practices, teen pregnancy, academic underachievement, delinquency, and crime and violence. What can be done to prevent these problems from occurring? Outlining a vigorous "call to arms," this volume describes the steps needed to overcome these potential problems by enhancing academic researchers' responsiveness to the needs of the community and encouraging them to apply the results of research findings to community outreach. After reviewing the problems that beset today's youth, Lerner offers a model - developmental contextualism - that provides a theoretical framework for viewing child and adolescent development in relation to specific features of environmental "context," such as family, neighborhood, society, and culture. This model is used to describe the problems and the potentials that are associated with the bidirectional relationships between youth and their contexts. Lerner asserts that, by altering the context in which youth live, researchers can test the effectiveness of policies and/or programs in creating desired changes in children's and adolescents' behavior and development.

xviii, 666 p. : 24 cm

"With Social Change, Public Policy, and Community Collaboration the editors present new and innovative scholarship aimed at changing the character of graduate and undergraduate education in human development-related disciplines, Not merely an academic exercise, the book provides a new vision for reforming the nature of higher education by promoting co-learning and collaboration between universities and the communities they serve. It is essential reading for anyone concerned with training human development professionals for the twenty-first century." "This volume is derived from the papers and discussions from the Third National Conference on Applied Developmental Science."--BOOK JACKET.

This multidisciplinary handbook, edited by the premier scholars in the field, reflects the empirical work and growth in the field of adolescent psychology.