Description: Puberty is not a disease! A down-to-earth guide to adolescence that helps both parents and children find happiness. When puberty begins, both children and parents face a whirlwind of worries. It's a time when conflict grows between children who feel they're no longer little kids and increasingly assert themselves, and parents who still see them as too young and can't help but constantly interfere out of anxiety. Puberty begins with physical change. It arrives just as a child's body starts growing rapidly. As their bodies shoot up, their confidence swells too. They start to believe they can do anything an adult can do—and that they're entitled to. But then, one day, reality hits: nothing has really changed. Grades, looks, skills—none of it has improved. Once they face this reality, their sky-high confidence comes crashing back down to earth. Puberty is an endless cycle of struggling with the gap between inflated bravado and reality. This makes life hard for the child—and even harder for the parents watching their child's moods swing wildly. This book is a parenting guide that helps parents shift their perspective on children struggling through the peak of puberty, offering realistic solutions. Drawing on interviews with over 5,000 teens and parents and real counseling case studies, it provides concrete episodes and highly practical, applicable solutions, showing parents and children how to build a more mature relationship during this turning point. Real stories of puberty you can't understand until you've lived through it, and realistic solutions for parents feeling lost. The author, a well-known leadership instructor, formed a community called 'Muhan Teens' (meaning 'teens who can do anything') by gathering ten of her daughter's friends in an effort to repair her relationship with her own daughter, who was struggling at the peak of middle-school-age turmoil. With the goal of 'letting kids build their futures through play,' they spent a year chatting, playing games, traveling, and exploring themselves. The daughter who overcame puberty alongside her mother is now twenty and comforts her mother in return. While working tirelessly to understand her child, the author—who also runs leadership lectures for adults and career and leadership camps for teens—began researching the relationship between parents and children during adolescence, and this book distills that expertise. The book covers seven types of adolescent children—rebels, friend-obsessed, romance-obsessed, appearance-focused, study-stressed, family-conflicted, and game/smartphone-obsessed—each illustrated with real episodes shared by mothers the author has personally met. Real stories unfold that seem almost too dramatic to be true: children who talk back and swear at every turn, children who lock their doors and refuse to speak, children who are bullied or become bullies themselves, children caught watching inappropriate content on their phones. The hope is that parents struggling with their children's issues can find answers in this book's diverse case studies and insights on how to reshape their relationship with their child. The emotional instability that characterizes the psychological state of puberty is actually proof that a child is developing completely normally. The psychological state during puberty is intense and inconsistent. But over time, children become better at controlling outward expression, come to understand and accept their own state, and begin finding their own solutions. The key phrase here is 'over time.' In other words, once a child enters puberty, they experience serious psychological and emotional instability, and it takes time to reach a state of stability. Adults, too, need to give children that time and simply watch and wait until they find emotional stability. The problem is that parents and other adults often can't stand that waiting period—they grow anxious and impatient, unable to wait for the child to find stability on their own. That anxiety and impatience gets passed straight on to the child, making them even more anxious and less confident in themselves. In the end, this makes puberty even more intense and prolonged. The most representative example of this is the so-called 'middle-school-age syndrome.' —Part 1: Puberty, Evolving, pp.14–15. In order to protect their own mental state, children develop their own defense mechanisms—and that is the root of the most basic trait of puberty: bravado. —Part 1: Puberty, Evolving, p.22. If, during this period...