To Change a Mind: Parenting to Promote Maturity in Teenagers

In this companion to his first book, An Unchanged Mind, Dr. John McKinnon provides invaluable advice to all parents of teenagers and young adults. Using case studies gathered from his years helping parents with troubled adolescents, the author explores the ways that adolescent development can be derailed in today’s complex culture and how parents can prevent this from happening in the first place.

Dr. McKinnon writes about how parents need to recognize their children as individuals, with their own feelings and opinions, as they start to establish their separate identities as young people and begin to negotiate their way through high school and beyond. He also makes clear that parents must continue to establish limits. These allow children to flourish and further their goals within boundaries that enable them to learn the consequences of their actions (both good and bad), thus providing a fundamental lesson of being an adult. The book explains that parental recognition and limit-setting work together to promote maturity.

Packed with examples and sensible and practical advice for parents of pre-teens and teenagers, To Change a Mind is an essential guidebook for parents seeking to make their lives—and the lives of their children—richer and more fulfilling, as the family navigates together the potentially treacherous seas of adolescence.

John A. McKinnon, M.D., was educated at Harvard, Cambridge University, Case Western Reserve University, Yale, and Norwich University. He taught at the University of California, San Francisco, and directed psychiatry hospital programs in Texas and Montana. Disgusted with the mediocrity of "managed" care, he left traditional medical centers to co-found Montana Academy, a therapeutic school for troubled teenagers on a remote ranch near Glacier Park. His co-founder and wife, Rosemary, is also a therapist, and they have three daughters.