11 practical books for raising teenage daughters

Enough As She Is – Rachel Simmons: Enough As She Is offers practical parenting advice – including teaching girls self-compassion as an alternative to self-criticism, how to manage overthinking, resist the constant urge to compare themselves to peers, take healthy risks, navigate toxic elements of social media, prioritise self-care, and seek support when they need it.

Parenting a Teen Girl – Lucie Hemmen: Parenting a Teen Girl offers parents effective tips and strategies for understanding the dramatic, confusing highs and lows of adolescence and improving communication with their teenage daughters. Drawn from positive psychology, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), and Lucie Hemmen’s years of PhD experience, the skills in this workbook will help parents guide their daughters past the challenges of adolescence and toward healthier and more productive behaviours.

The Teen Girl’s Survival Guide – Lucie Hemmen: The Teen Girl’s Survival Guide offers tips for teens on finding their strengths, identifying negative self-talk, understanding social situations, and making new friends. Most importantly, they’ll discover key strategies for creating a strong sense of self-knowledge and self-appreciation-two key building blocks for succeeding in the social world, and beyond.

Untangled – Lisa Damour: In this New York Times best seller, Dr. Damour draws on decades of experience and the latest research to reveal the seven distinct – and absolutely normal – developmental transitions that turn girls into grown-ups, including Parting with Childhood, Contending with Adult Authority, Entering the Romantic World, and Caring for Herself. Providing realistic scenarios and welcome advice on how to engage daughters in smart, constructive ways, Untangled gives parents a broad framework for understanding their daughters while addressing their most common questions.

How to Talk So Teens Will Listen & Listen So Teens Will Talk – Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish: From the widely-acclaimed How to Talk series, discover the tools to combat the often stormy years of adolescence. Packed with practical, accessible advice and guidelines, both parents and teens will learn how to: Engage cooperation; Take appropriate action; Avoid lectures; Express your feelings and understand each other; Work out solutions together.

The Princess Bitchface Syndrome 2.0 – Michael Carr-Gregg and Elly Robinson: This indispensable book focuses on the special trials of raising adolescent girls today, including: adolescent development in a new society, pressures at school, parenting strategies that work, parenting in the digital age, sex and drugs, mental health and technology.

The Butterfly Effect – Danielle Miller: The Butterfly Effect offers practical, intuitive and powerful strategies, and uses humour to disarm and open up new ways of looking at self-esteem, resilience, body image, friendship, consumerism, navigating the online world, overcoming girls’ fear of failure and finding positive role models.

Don’t Let Your Emotions Run Your Life For Teens – Sheri Van Dijk: Based in dialectical behaviour therapy, a type of therapy designed to help people who have a hard time handling their intense emotions, this workbook helps teens learn the skills they need to ride the ups and downs of life with grace and confidence. This book offers easy techniques to help teens: Stay calm and mindful in difficult situations, effectively manage out-of-control emotion, reduce the pain of intense emotions and get along with family and friends.

Smart but Scattered Teens – Richard Guare, Peg Dawson, Colin Guare: The latest research in child development shows that many kids who have the brain and heart to succeed lack or lag behind in crucial “executive skills”–the fundamental habits of mind required for getting organised, staying focused, and controlling impulses and emotions. Learn easy to-follow steps to identify your child’s strengths and weaknesses, use activities and techniques proven to boost specific skills, and problem solve daily routines. Small changes can add up to big improvements–this empowering book shows how.

Raising Girls in the 21st Century – Steve Biddulph: Steve Biddulph talks to the world’s leading voices on girls’ needs and makes their ideas clear and simple, adding his own humour and experience through stories that you will never forget. Even the illustrations, by Kimio Kubo, provide unique and moving glimpses into the inner lives of girls. Along with his fellow psychologists worldwide, Steve is angry at the exploitation and harm being done to girls today. With Raising Girls he strives to spark a movement to end the trashing of girlhood; equipping parents to deal with the modern world, and getting the media off the backs of our daughters. Raising Girls is powerful, practical and positive.

Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder – Sarah Hendricks: Outlining how autism presents differently and can hide itself in females and what the likely impact will be for them throughout their lifespan, the book looks at how females with ASD experience diagnosis, childhood, education, adolescence, friendships, sexuality, employment, pregnancy and parenting, and aging. It will provide invaluable guidance for the professionals who support these girls and women and it will offer women with autism a guiding light in interpreting and understanding their own life experiences through the experiences of others.

Being Brave – Hester Leung and Sema Musson: Written by two career mothers and friends, Being Brave, is a novel and personal development guide for young girls about self esteem and resilience. Co-authors Hester Leung and Sema Musson wrote the book as a result of the struggles they had when they were growing up and turning it into something positive. “We felt like we wanted to shared the tools that helped us through moments of self doubt and inner criticism when we were young. We also felt in today’s society given the increased challenges young girls are facing with social media, more than ever this book should be a crucial part of their toolkit!”