Your Teenager: Thinking About Your Child During the Secondary School Years

Martha Harris

Dec 2007 · Karnac Books

About this ebook

The Teenager books by Martha Harris, originally published in 1969, take a similar approach to her long-term bestseller Thinking about Infants and Young Children. Rooted vividly in the practicalities of everyday situations, the educational focus is on helping parents use constructively the turbulent emotions that are aroused in them by their child. The structural hinge is her empathy with the struggling child in all of us, and with the difficulty of becoming educated in the deepest and widest sense of that term. If the central task of the adolescent is defined as one of finding their individual identity, then the task of parents is a reciprocal one: it is to re educate themselves through questioning their own relationships, values, emotions and principles. Her aim is that children and parents may make the most of this opportunity to develop in tandem, with a view to ultimately taking their place in the great social class of the truly educated people, the people who are still learning.

About the author

Martha Harris (1919-1987) read English at University College London and then Psychology at Oxford. She taught in a Froebel Teacher Training College and was trained as a Psychologist at Guys Hospital, as a Child Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, where she was for many years responsible for the child psychotherapy training in the department of Children and Families, and as a Psychoanalyst at the British Institute of Psychoanalysis. Together with her first husband Roland Harris (a teacher) she started a pioneering schools counselling service. With her second husband Donald Meltzer she wrote a psychoanalytical model of 'The Child in the Family in the Community' for multidisciplinary use in schools and therapeutic units.

Meg Harris Williams, a writer and artist, studied English at the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford and art at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, and has had a lifelong psychoanalytic education, working closely with Donald Meltzer. She has written and lectured extensively in the UK and abroad on psychoanalysis and literature. She is a visiting lecturer for AGIP and at the Tavistock Centre in London, and an Honorary Member of the Psychoanalytic Center of California. She is married with four children and lives in Farnham, Surrey.