Richard Lerner seeks to challenge the societal consensus that adolescents are necessarily troubled. He most recently does so in
The Good Teen, by using research results, anecdotes, statistics, and his thirty plus years’ experience of studying adolescence. Lerner presents the perspective that “Most teens – and there are about forty million of them between the ages of ten and nineteen – have an undeserved bad rap” (Lerner
2007, p. 11). Even though academics can benefit from reading
The Good Teen, it was written for parents with the hope of initiating a widespread societal transformation in the way adolescence is viewed and the manner in which adolescents are treated. …
