Parenting Jewish Teens: A Guide for the Perplexed

In a friendly, supportive tone, with humor and insight, this book will help you face the challenges of raising your Jewish teenager. It offers ancient and contemporary Jewish parenting wisdom and shows you through real life examples how ties to your Jewish community can sustain you in difficult times. You will come away with advice on how to survive your children’s teen years in an environment that fosters love and maturity—and an understanding on how you can change, grow, and reach toward holiness and wholeness in your own life.

This comprehensive, first-of-its-kind guidebook explores the questions and issues that shape the world in which today's Jewish teenagers live and offers constructive advice that can help Jewish parents maintain their sanity, dignity, and loving family relationships as their children grow.

In a friendly, supportive tone, with humor and insight, this book will help you face the challenges of raising your Jewish teenager. It offers ancient and contemporary Jewish parenting wisdom and shows you through real life examples how ties to your Jewish community can sustain you in difficult times. You will come away with advice on how to survive your children's teen years in an environment that fosters love and maturity-and an understanding on how you can change, grow, and reach toward holiness and wholeness in your own life.

Publishers Weekly

A good word for the disorientation many parents feel during their children's teenage years is "perplexed." In a twist on the title of Maimonides's 12th-century philosophical tome The Guide for the Perplexed, Doades offers a compassionate parenting manual that aims Judaism's messages at the "tumultuous, challenging and chaotic" teen years. "Parenting Jewish teens today is about finding something to hang onto (Judaism works) as you try to hang onto your kids (don't give up, no matter what they look, smell or act like)," she writes. Contemporary society, plagued by a decline in communal connectedness, compounds the hormonal upheaval by providing few consequences for behavior and popularizing a culture that denigrates authority, she says. Judaism's enduring values will not only serve them in good stead, providing tools to evaluate their choices, but will comfort and direct parents in maintaining dignity, sanity and family relationships. In a sympathetic parent-to-parent tone, Doades explores issues of separation, culture, conflict, family relationships, changing parental roles, interfaith dilemmas and special-needs situations, with examples from the Bible and Jewish literature. She urges parents to start Jewish teen parenting groups, and concludes that despite the normal teenage need for separation, parents must echo the Bible's message, Hineini, "Here I am." (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.