Robert Epstein, former editor in chief of Psychology Today, shows that teen turmoil is caused by outmoded systems put in place a century ago which destroyed the continuum between childhood and adulthood. Where this continuum still exists in other countries, there is no adolescence.

Isolated from adults, American teens learn everything they know from their media-dominated peers the last people on earth they should be learning from, says Epstein. Epstein explains that our teens are highly capable in some ways more capable than adults and argues strongly against infantilizing young people. We must rediscover the adult in every teen, he says, by giving young people adult authority and responsibility as soon as they can demonstrate readiness.

This landmark book will change the thinking about teens for decades to come.

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In Grade 7, 23% of students report a high level of school connectedness, while a mere 7% report a high level by Grade 10.

The McCreary Centre Society, Healthy Connections: Listening to BC Youth.
Highlights From the Adolescent Health Survey II, The McCreary Centre Society (1999)

In Grade 6, 28% of youth report liking school, whereas only 17% of Grade 10 students (and only 14% of Grade 10 boys) say the same.

William Boyce, Young People in Canada:
Their Health and Well-being, Health Canada (2002)

The Freedom Writers Diary is the amazing true story of strength, courage, and achievement in the face of adversity. In the fall of 1994, in Room 203 at Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, an idealistic twenty-four-year-old teacher named Erin Gruwell faced her first group of students, dubbed by the administration as “unteachable, at-risk” teenagers. This group was unlike any she had ever interacted with.

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