Helping Teenagers Grow Up

It is a banal truth that kids don’t come with operating manuals. But that hasn’t stopped publishers from offering manuals to parents. In this crowded field of printed advice, John McKinnon’s new book To Change a Mind (Lantern Books, 2011) stands out as a useful addition.

Although it is a relatively thin volume (207 pp.), Dr. McKinnon has managed to take a complex subject and reduce it to its essentials. The subtitle to the book—Parenting to Promote Maturity in Teenagers--hints at what makes this book somewhat different from standard parenting manuals. In McKinnon’s estimation, promoting maturity is the parent’s job during the teenage years. As a psychiatrist and co-founder of a therapeutic boarding school in Montana, McKinnon knows well this subject. His previous book, An Unchanged Mind: The Problem of Immaturity in Adolescence, argued that many problems of adolescence, even clinical ones, can be traced immaturity. Drawing on data from his years working with students at Montana Academy, McKinnon proposed that internal and external “obstacles” block some adolescents’ development into adulthood.

While An Unchanged Mind is addressed to psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, To Change a Mind is addressed to parents. To promote maturity in adolescents, McKinnon suggests that parents focus on two principles: recognition and limit-setting. By recognition, McKinnon means that parents need to really see their teenagers for who they are and who they are becoming: their strengths, their weaknesses, their interests, hopes, and dreams. Moreover, he stresses that recognition is an act, not just a thought, emphasizing that teens need to verbally hear and emotionally feel that parents are actively engaged in knowing them. In discussing recognition, McKinnon offers several case studies, describing how a lack of recognition stunts maturation of teenagers. Similarly, McKinnon explains limit-setting as essential to adolescents’ evolving sense of competence and morality as they move into adulthood. As with recognition, he provides case studies and specific examples of how to establish and maintain limits.

The value of this book is the blending of theory and practical application. Because McKinnon has vast experience dealing with troubled adolescents, he has a grounded sense of what can and does go wrong in development of child to adult. However, he also offers very detailed examples—even down to possible scripts and scenarios—to guide parents in applying the principles. While this may sound reductive and simplistic, rather than helpful and accurate, it doesn’t play that way. McKinnon acknowledges that there are many possible ways to recognize and set limits. He also acknowledges the difficulty of doing so for some parents. Given a vast and tangled subject like parenting, McKinnon has marked a useful path through the thickets.