As a parent, you want practical, accurate and user friendly information to help raise your teen. You want to know what’s considered normal adolescent behaviour, how to determine whether your child is on a good path, how to encourage your teen’s healthy development, and how to get help when problems arise. What Parents Need to Know about Teens is an easy-to-read booklet that addresses these issues. Author David A. Wolfe is a clinical psychologist who has worked with children and teens for more than 25 years. He holds the RBC Chair in Children’s Mental Health at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. In his work, Dr. Wolfe has often encountered parents who describe feeling overwhelmed with the problems their teenage children bring home, especially when some of these difficulties didn’t exist when they were growing up themselves. This booklet is a response to parents’ concerns. Written in chatty, down-to-earth language, What Parents Need to Know about Teens addresses the facts and myths of teen life and teens’ relationships with parents. The booklet focuses on strategies to help parents prepare teens for new responsibilities and the pressures that may accompany them. Each section of the booklet is devoted to a different parenting strategy: 1 Be an effective parent: Balance sensitivity and firmness. 2 Place an emphasis on safety, responsibility and obeying rules. 3 Teach—don’t just criticize. 4 Understand your teen’s development—and how it affects your relationship. 5 Understand the pressures—and the risks—your teen faces.

David A. Wolfe, PhD, ABPP, is a psychologist specializing in issues affecting children and youth — including prevention of bullying.

After completing his PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of South Florida in 1980, David Wolfe pursued an academic career in Canada focusing on child abuse and domestic violence. He holds the inaugural RBC Chair in Children’s Mental Health at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) and heads the CAMH Centre for Prevention Science in London, Ontario. He is also Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the University of Toronto. Since 2007 he has served as Editor-in-Chief of Child Abuse & Neglect: The International Journal.

David has received the Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science from the Canadian Psychological Association, and the Blanche L. Ittleson Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Delivery of Childrens Services and the Promotion of Childrens Mental Health from the American Orthopsychiatric Association. His books include Adolescent Risk Behaviors: Why teens experiment and strategies to keep them safe (with P. Jaffe & C. Crooks; Yale University Press, 2006); Child abuse: Implications for child development and psychopathology, 2nd Edition (Sage, 1999); and Abnormal Child Psychology, 4th edition (with E. Mash; Wadsworth, 2009).

His interests in violence prevention have culminated into a comprehensive school-based initiative for reducing adolescent violence and related risk behaviors, known as the Fourth R. The Fourth R is currently used in over 800 high schools throughout Canada. It was recently identified as a top evidence-based program for school-based violence prevention by the New Jersey-based Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, where it is being implemented in several US sites as part of their national violence-prevention initiative.

David A. Wolfe's profile page