Wise Minded Parenting: Mastering the Seven Essentials for Raising Successful Tweens and Teens

Raising a happy and successful teenager is a challenge for any parent, even the most patient and wisest among us. Parenting adolescents requires all sorts of skills that most of us don’t naturally possess. In this down-to-earth, practical guide, you’ll learn how to tap your “wise mind” to calmly navigate even the stormiest of parenting moments. You'll learn how to preserve your loving relationship while encouraging progress towards the 7 essentials of happy, healthy teens:

• Secure attachment to parents
• Self-control
• Academic success
• Social thriving
• Emotional flourishing
• Strong character
• Physical health

With humor, wisdom and a deep understanding of the teenaged brain, Dr. Kastner, author of Getting to Calm: Cool-Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens and Teens, and Russell provide clear and useful tools for parents, giving them effective new ways to manage their own emotions in the heat of the moment with their teen while maintaining — and even gaining — closeness.

Laura S. Kastner, Ph.D., is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington. Dr. Kastner’s speeches and lectures have included over 100 presentations on topics relating to parenting and family issues. She has frequently been the keynote speaker at Pediatric, Adolescent Medicine, and Nursing conferences. Kastner and Jennifer Wyatt are the authors of The Launching Years: Strategies for Parenting from Senior Year to College Life, The Seven Year Stretch: How Families Work Together to Grow Through Adolescence, and Getting to CALM: Cool-Headed Strategies for Parenting Tweens + Teens.

Kristen Russell is a Seattle-based journalist, long-time television news reporter and producer, and the former managing editor of several Seattle-based magazines, including ParentMap andSeattle magazine. She holds a master’s degree in Journalism from the University of California at Berkeley and is the mother of two teenagers.