Here are 100 books that Untangled fans have personally recommended if you like
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For the last 14 years, I've written books that aim to tackle the most pressing worries for parents and educators – and to understand and connect with kids better. It’s a sad fact that research continues to show that our kids are not as happy as they might be, often due to feeling overwhelmed by academic pressures at school, and growing up in a more ‘stressed’ society. So, as a parent and a parenting journalist, I believe it’s never been more important to understand how the world looks to them – and give both parents and kids evidence-based tools to help them navigate this. I aim to make my books enlightening, readable, and practical.
While it’s generally agreed that our teens are going through a tougher time, I think that if we give them the skills to understand their own thinking they can ultimately come through this period stronger and more resilient. What’s more, we can’t just tell them how their minds work. They have to understand it for themselves. So that’s why I love this book which compresses the science for teens and gives them a ready-to-use tool kit for everything from handling worries to feeling better about their bodies.
This positive and insightful guide gives you the tools to build your confidence, eliminate negative feelings and boost happiness in all areas of your life.
Being a teenager has its own unique challenges, but it's also the perfect time to shape your own mental wellbeing and happiness. Scientists reckon 40% of your happiness is within your control, that's A LOT of happiness and this book will help you to harness it...
There are tons of ideas to try from creating an anxiety toolkit, to planning a digital detox and meditating, plus you'll learn the science behind why they work. Carry…
For the last 14 years, I've written books that aim to tackle the most pressing worries for parents and educators – and to understand and connect with kids better. It’s a sad fact that research continues to show that our kids are not as happy as they might be, often due to feeling overwhelmed by academic pressures at school, and growing up in a more ‘stressed’ society. So, as a parent and a parenting journalist, I believe it’s never been more important to understand how the world looks to them – and give both parents and kids evidence-based tools to help them navigate this. I aim to make my books enlightening, readable, and practical.
This book was another total game-changer and I will never stop recommending it. It totally benefits from being written by a parent, rather than a clinician, but fearlessly tackles the terror faced by mothers and fathers when their child starts to struggle with a serious mental health crisis. It also offers a fearless road map out of this dark place. Suzanne writes beautifully too which makes the book easy to read despite its difficult subject matter. Suzanne now heads up the charity and Facebook support group, Parenting Mental Health, which is a safe haven for many parents where they can honestly express what it’s like to be in this very scary place.
How to help your child with mental illness through partnering, not parenting.
Never Let Go is a supportive and practical guide for parents looking after a child with a mental illness. Suzanne Alderson understands the agonising struggle of bringing a child back from the brink of suicide, having spent three years supporting her own daughter through recovery. Her method of 'partnering, not parenting' has now helped thousands of other parents through her charity, Parenting Mental Health.
Combining Suzanne's honest personal experience with expert input from psychologists, this book provides parents with the methods and knowledge they need to support, shield…
For the last 14 years, I've written books that aim to tackle the most pressing worries for parents and educators – and to understand and connect with kids better. It’s a sad fact that research continues to show that our kids are not as happy as they might be, often due to feeling overwhelmed by academic pressures at school, and growing up in a more ‘stressed’ society. So, as a parent and a parenting journalist, I believe it’s never been more important to understand how the world looks to them – and give both parents and kids evidence-based tools to help them navigate this. I aim to make my books enlightening, readable, and practical.
This book was another eye-opener. Educator Rachel Simmons lifted the lid on how not all meanness and bullying among children is overt, obvious, or easily spotted. She decodes relational aggression between young people - a kind of stealth attack, using words and exclusion, and techniques like seat-saving, gossip, and silent treatment. This kind of behaviour can be particularly painful for young people to understand or process because it is so hard to name. But in this book, Simmons put her finger on it, so it can be understood and recognized. It means that when young people experience it, they will not feel so hurt and singled out by it.
Rooted in the extensive expertise she has developed since "Odd Girl Out" was first published as well as up-to-date research, Simmons offers a new chapter on technology, including a focus on cyber bullying and what parents and teachers can do to deal with the problem, as well as advice to girls on how to avoid drama online. Working directly from her experiences with schools and families over the past decade, she also brings us new classroom initiatives and step-by-step suggestions for parents. With illuminating, timely additions, this definitive resource is now even more relevant, still shining a powerful spotlight on…
For the last 14 years, I've written books that aim to tackle the most pressing worries for parents and educators – and to understand and connect with kids better. It’s a sad fact that research continues to show that our kids are not as happy as they might be, often due to feeling overwhelmed by academic pressures at school, and growing up in a more ‘stressed’ society. So, as a parent and a parenting journalist, I believe it’s never been more important to understand how the world looks to them – and give both parents and kids evidence-based tools to help them navigate this. I aim to make my books enlightening, readable, and practical.
In this book, the late Peter Benson, argues that by the teenage years, with help every young person can identify their unique strength - the thing they are naturally good at and would do anyway if left to their own devices. He argues this doesn’t have to be academic. It can be things like the ability to listen, a commitment to animal welfare, a passion for the environment, anything in the creative arts, or caring for others. He discussed how every single young person can be helped to identify their ‘spark.’ I often cite Benson’s concept of ‘spark’ in my own books because it does so much to help young people feel better about themselves, find their life purpose and undo the damage our grades-obsessed, one-size-fits-all education system does to the self-worth of so many.
In this practical book, Dr. Peter Benson, a leading authority on childhood and adolescence, describes a simple yet powerful plan for awakening the spark that lives inside each and every young person. Sparks-when illuminated and nurtured-give young people joy, energy, and direction. They have the power to change a young person's life from one of "surviving" to "thriving." Grounded in new research with thousands of teenagers and parents, Sparks offers a step-by-step approach to helping teenagers discover their unique gifts, and works for all families, no matter their economic status, parenting situation, or ethnic background.
I know the pain of separations. Navy doctor father. Missionary kid at boarding school in India. Military wife. Military mother. Separations suck. So when my three-year-old grandchild Lily struggled with her daddy’s deployment in 2010, I felt her pain. I composed the story and used personal photos to illustrate Lily Hates Goodbyes. Whenever we read about book Lily’s emotions, my Lily would say, “Just like me!” Wanting other children to have this cathartic experience, I hired Nathan Stoltenberg, a brilliant illustrator, and self-published the book. It’s available in a Navy version and an All Military version—the only difference is daddy’s uniform. Book Lily is a friend to young military children around the world.
I had the privilege of hearing Dr. Ginsburg speak years ago and immediately bought this book. I’ve relied on it ever since and wish every parent could have a copy. As a pediatrician specializing in Adolescent Medicine, Ginsburg’s perspective and wisdom focus on strengthening family connections. Chapter 22 is specifically about military children, although the whole book will provide value for every family.
Help prepare the children and teens in your life to face life's challenges with grace and grit. In this award-winning guide author and pediatrician Dr. Ken Ginsburg shares his 7 crucial Cs: competence, confidence, connection, character, contribution, coping, and control. You'll discover how to incorporate these concepts into your parenting style and communication strategies, thereby strengthening your connection. And that connection will position you to guide your child to bounce back from life's challenges and forge a meaningful and successful life. You'll also learn detailed coping strategies to help children and teenagers deal with the stresses of academic pressure, media…
My whole life I have loved working with children, corny though it sounds! (I guess that’s why I wasn’t so surprised to give birth to triplets 43 years ago!) For the past 50 years, my work has been with children and families. I have been a teacher, a school head, and I even founded an early childhood center. I am deeply committed to children and families, helping parents along the often rocky but so fulfilling parenting pathway. I provide the support for parents I wish I had had when I raised my brood.
Over and over I urge my clients to read this book before they think they need to…even if they’re not “privileged.” In it we learn the real-life effects of over-privilege, of giving our kids too much, and more, of not expecting enough from them. Learning the critical connections between the choices we make for our kids and their emotional development certainly helps any parent to be the parent she hoped to be.
Madeline Levine has been a practicing psychologist for 25 years, but it was only recently that she began to observe a new breed of unhappy teenager. When a bright, affluent 15-year-old girl, a seemingly unlikely candidate for emotional problems, came into her office with the word 'empty' carved into her left forearm, Levine was shaken. The girl and her cutting seemed to personify a startling pattern Levine had been observing among her teenage patients, all of them bright, affluent, and clearly loved by their parents. Behind a veneer of strength, many of them suffered extreme emotional problems: depression, anxiety, and…
I am an award-winning author of two five-star rated memoirs: “My Whorizontal Life: An Escort’s Tale” and “A Someday Courtesan,” and the creator/performer of the 90-minute solo show: “My Whorizontal Life: The Show!” I co-host the podcast My Index to Sex. and I am a Juilliard Drama Graduate and the former #1 escort in the country. Thinking about how I grew up in a safe, typical suburb in the middle of America made me wonder if the things that happened to me with men as a girl happened to many women as we came of age in the 70s.
Although we have very different voices and approaches to a similar question, ‘How do society and our patriarchal conditioning warp our girlhood?’, we write about it in very different voices and from a different perspective.
I read her to hear what another girl/woman who felt the same pressure was able to express and move on from. Interestingly, I grew up and seemed at home as an escort, and in another of her memoirs, Ms. Febos became, for a time, a dominatrix. I found that fascinating as well.
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner National Bestseller Lambda Literary Award Finalist
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME * NPR * The Washington Post * Kirkus Reviews * Washington Independent Review of Books * The Millions * Electric Literature * Ms Magazine * Entropy Magazine * Largehearted Boy * Passerbuys
“Irreverent and original.” –New York Times
“Magisterial.” –The New Yorker
“An intoxicating writer.” –The Atlantic
“A classic!” –Mary Karr
“A true light in the dark.” –Stephanie Danler
“An essential, heartbreaking project.” –Carmen Maria Machado
A gripping set of stories about the forces that shape girls…
I have been conducting psychotherapy for over 30 years, much of it with young people navigating the tricky path between dependent adolescence and independent adulthood. I’ve seen the downsides of stasis and stagnation, and the tremendous benefits of learning to stand and take the tiller of one’s own life. Many of my goals in writing, vlogging, and doing therapy involve helping young adults steer their way around the potholes in the paths they aspire to tread. More broadly, I have worked on various fronts to “give psychology away,” as instructed during my training, making psychological and life-management knowledge as open and as easily accessed as possible. I operate one of Vancouver’s largest psychotherapy services and provide training to clinicians across Canada in effective mental health interventions for mood- and anxiety-related concerns.
Jay points out that the decade of the twenties, once regarded as the core of young adult life, has become for many a kind of extended adolescence - or an early retirement. The skills, knowledge, habits, and talents which would ordinarily be developed during this time are put off for a later that may prove too late. She makes the case for treating the decade seriously - while still having fun and laying the groundwork for yet more enjoyment later on in life.
Revised and reissued for a new generation, The Defining Decade has changed the way millions of twentysomethings think about their twenties -- and themselves.
Our "thirty-is-the-new-twenty" culture tells us the twentysomething years don't matter. Some say they are an extended adolescence. Others call them an emerging adulthood. In The Defining Decade, Meg Jay argues that twentysomethings have been caught in a swirl of hype and misinformation, much of which has trivialized the most transformative time of our lives.
Drawing from more than two decades of work with thousands of clients and students, Jay weaves the latest science of the twentysomething…
I’ve been writing, speaking, blogging, and tweeting about the history of American children and their childhoods for many decades. When I went to school—a long time ago—the subject did not come up, nor did I learn much in college or graduate school. I went out and dug up the story as did many of the authors I list here. I read many novels and autobiographies featuring childhood, and I looked at family portraits in museums with new eyes. Childhood history is fascinating and it is a lot of fun. And too, it is a great subject for book groups.
This is a book about my life—growing up in the middle of the twentieth century. Bobby Soxers, juvenile delinquents, popular music, MTV, Freedom Riders, Anti-War protestors…it’s all here, along with much more. It isn’t about the good old days; this book takes us to the heart of the culture created decades ago and still influencing us today. We knew teenage life was complex and this book reveals just why that is the case. You’ll wish it came with a playlist.
Nobody worried about teenagers" prior to the 1940s. In fact, as a culturally or economically defined entity they did not exist. But in the 50 years since the last world war, when the term was first coined, teenagers have had an enormous impact on American culture. They have reshaped our language, our music, our clothes. They have changed forever the way we respond to authority. They have become a 200 billion consumer group avidly courted by marketers. And they have changed our culture, which will never again treat their demographic group merely as young adults. Teenagers ranges widely across American…
The stories I’ve loved the most in my life have all been about the richness of human relationships, told by a memorable narrator who can find humor and hope in almost everything, no matter how screwed up. Whether it’s Charles Dickens poking fun at his contemporaries in Victorian England or Armistead Maupin sending up friendship and love in San Francisco in the 1980s, I’m a sucker for well-told, convoluted, and funny tales about people who find life with other human beings difficult, but still somehow manage to laugh about it and keep on going. As the author of six novels myself, these are the kinds of stories I always try to tell.
On the surface, this is a coming-of-age story with a protagonist similar to many others in the genre—bright, witty, snobbish, and pissed off at almost everybody he meets. But what makes this book so good is the narrator’s intelligence and self-awareness, and the complexity of all the characters and their relationships.
My own upbringing was a far cry from the wealthy, highly-cultured world depicted here—I grew up in a tiny town in southern Iowa, and though there was a college in town I had little access to culture—yet I could completely relate to the gay narrator’s fish-out-of-water feeling and his desire to be understood. I also loved his close relationship with his grandmother, since my grandmother was equally important to me.
Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him–including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. He would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You takes place…
