Forming Character in Adolescents

Almost every parent knows it: adolescence can feel like a whirlwind. But popular Catholic psychologist Dr. Rudolf Allers insists that this needn’t be the case. Long before modern experts began pathologizing normal teenage behavior, Dr. Allers exposed as myth the Freudian claims that adolescent rebellion is (a) inevitable and (b) primarily sexual in origin.

In this essential parent guidebook, Allers offers practical wisdom for understanding, guiding, and influencing your teenager with confidence and compassion. Contrary to “pop psychology,” these pages restore solid reasoning, moral clarity, and common sense to the art of parenting.

You’ll learn how to recognize and respond to the challenges that can impede even the best-raised teens — selfishness, apathy, arrogance, laziness, dishonesty, and more — while helping them develop into mature, well-grounded, faith-filled adults. With practical examples and jargon-free explanations, Dr. Allers shows you:

• How to calm adolescent anxiety and build courage in uncertain times
• Ways to earn trust and communicate effectively with teens
• How to teach respect for authority without rigidity or fear
• Strategies to spark young people’s intellectual curiosity and virtue

• How to help teens navigate moodiness and temptation with grace

   

Allers equips you with the tools you need to accomplish your topmost goals as a parent: preserving your children’s faith, morals, and character through the potentially turbulent years of adolescence — and beyond.

A detailed topical index makes this indispensable handbook easy to reference, but its wisdom will stay with you long after the last page. As Dr. Allers makes clear, raising teens doesn’t have to be debilitating — it can be sanctifying.

Rudolf Allers (1883–1963) was a neurologist, psychiatrist, philosopher, former prominent Freudian, former founding member of the Adlerian Society of Individual Psychology, friend of Edith Stein, and mentor of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Viktor E. Frankl. Allers wrote numerous books and articles. His specialty was the combination of psychiatry, philosophy, and anthropology, with incisive views about Sigmund Freud, Heidegger, St. Augustine, existentialism, phenomenology, and Thomistic thought.