R132: Therapy with 21st-Century Teens

How do you get through to these kids, much less establish a healing relationship with them? As you’ll discover in this Reading Course, you have to forego the old constraints of traditional therapy to make any impression on these easily-bored kids. Among the suggestions offered, Ron Taffel dissects the pop culture’s “tyranny of cool” and the epidemic of dissociation that keeps today’s kids alienated from their authentic selves, describing a strategy for helping these kids discover their own genuine passions. With Martha Straus, we explore 10 tips for dealing with difficult adolescent girls, and how to understand the mystifying logic of self-injury among them. Matthew Selekman offers a strategy to use when your teen clients give you the silent treatment. Victor Shklyarevsky, Kimball Magoni, and Janet Sasson Edgette discuss a bracing way of responding to teenage anger: countering kids’ intensity with your own--literally, giving it as well as taking it. Finally, Terry Hargrave describes the problem of launching “adult-child stay-at-homes”--kids in their early twenties who cling to a protracted adolescence.

Course Readings

The Divided Self: Inside the World of 21st-Century Teens by Ron Taffel

Cyberspaced: Hanging Out With the In Crowd on MySpace.com by Mary Sykes Wylie

Lost in Electronica: Today’s Media Culture Is Leaving Boys at a Loss For Words by Adam Cox

Hungry for Connection: 10 Ways To Improve Your Therapy with Adolescent Girls by Martha Straus

The Logic of Self-Injury: A Teen Symptom for Our Time by Martha Straus

Hallway Therapy: Systems Thinking Goes to the Classroom by David Seaburn

Pathologizing for Dollars: The Rise of the AD/HD Diagnosis by Lawrence Diller

Mission Possible: The Art of Engaging Tough Teens by Mathew Selekman

Measure for Measure: How to Engage an Angry Teen by Victor Shklyarevsky et al.

Failure to Launch: The Struggle To Leave Home in the 21st Century by Terry Hargrave

Learning Objectives

1. Describe the different “cut-offs” that teens experience.
2. List the risks and rewards of MySpace for today’s teens.
3. Discuss the important differences in working with teenage boys and teenage girls.
4. Discuss how to move therapy with teens from the office to the realities of life at school.