The fundamental fact about our experience is that it is a process of change.ãWilliam James Teenager. The word conjures up images of remoteness, irrationality, mystery, even chaos, in the minds of many adults. However slanted the associations, it is nonetheless a fact of family life that parents and their teenagers can, almost effortlessly, confuse or antagonize each other. They seem to speak at cross-purposes. They seem to value conflicting cultures. They seem to inhabit opposing worlds.

As parents you cannot afford to be discouraged. You can understand your teenagers. In fact, teenagers need more than ever before to be understood. The problem is, they need you to hear what they can't quite articulate and to see what they really can't show you.

Teenagers develop by growing upãand by growing up fastãjust beyond your view. During adolescence, growing up goes along with growing away. That is in the nature of adolescence. At the moment when teenagers seem at risk of slipping away, and when you may very well feel frustrated enough to let them, though, Field Guide points in the direction of reconciliation. What makes life so hard for parents is that they find it hard to shake their memories of the child they once knew who has now grown up. But that child is no more. And now you need to re-learn who your child has become: a teenager.

This is why Field Guide combines stories of teenagers in their natural setting with compassionate, in-depth analysis and pragmatic counsel. It shows teenagers' living their lives on their own terms: for example, working a part-time job, taking a class, playing on a team, reaching out to an adult, saving a struggling friend, breaking hearts, falling in love, talking to the school counselor, driving around late at night. It illuminates the extraordinary in the ordinary reality of everyday teenage life. And it dramatizes teenagers' addressing the crucibles of their livesãsexual identity, drugs, divorce, mortality, and so onãthrough stories and conversations. Teenagers' lives, like adults', are series of stories and conversations.

This field guide may seem unusual insofar as it has no pictures or maps, and not much of a field, either. The conventional field guide informs your perception, training you to understand what it is you are seeingãand what it is you are missing. In a parallel way, however, this book invites you to glimpse aspects of your own children in these universal accounts of self-discovery and of family. It has often been remarked that, if you truly want to understand your teenagers, talk to their friendsãnot to grill them for inside information, but to gain an appreciation of their daily struggles and joys. Similarly, though your children may not be (to refer to a few chapter themes) depressed, anorexic, learning disabled, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, starring on a team, or losing a part-time job, you can be absolutely sure they brush every day against those who are, and these teenagers, who may well be their best friends, are central to their world and their self-conception.

Each chapter features three elements: a Narrative, at least one Conversation, and Notes Home. At the heart of each is a representative tale, based upon real-life incidents and experiences of teenagers' confronting risks, challenges, and opportunities. There are no compact allegories, as befits such real-life fables. The information can be ambiguous and multi-leveled, the participants muddled, the choices unclear or hard to make. In short, an episode in the life of a teenager. Here is where readers will overhear the voices of teenagers growing up. They can also hear those voices in those conversations that take place between a teenager and a trusted adult, such as a teacher, a coach, an advisor, a guidance counselor, a family friend, an employer. This is a freeze-frame instant of a teenager reaching out for clarification, insight, support, and relationship. Such reaching out occurs daily, probably hourly, wherever teenagers and adults converge. In their talking, we watch them take a turn, usually inward. This is where you can see how teenagers think, dream, imagine, and cope, and yearn to work out conflicts, internal and external. (Teenagers are the emperors of self-revelation, but always on their own terms, and usually gradually, partially, obliquely.) In the notes home we expand upon each chapter's subject, explicitly and tangentially. We point out the principal developmental issues at play in the experience and the deeper levels of meaning and significance. (In addition, in the Appendixes we provide for reference purposes description and analysis of adolescent development year by year.) We also provide in the notes home practical suggestions for parents to improve their relationships with their teenagers.

In some parenting books, anecdotes and dialogues are simply in the service of illustrating a point or two about a major topic, like depression, anorexia, athletics. Ours is different. Field Guide models the messy reality of parents and of teenagers. In the life of any family, experiences seldom arrive in neat packages. Sometimes with our teenagers we get more information than we want, and sometimes we get less information than we need. The same is true with these narratives.

The art of parenting begins with knowing how to read kids in between the lines of their lives. Teenagers don't fall in love, or grieve, or smoke, or play soccer in a vacuum. We only know what these experiences mean for them, and for us, when we grasp them in the context of their tribulations, aspirations, and dreams. Their decisions and choices, their weaknesses and strengths, are inter-connected.

What sort of guidance do you as parents desire? Naturally, you might wish that there were sure-fire do's and don't's and a set of foolproof, unambiguous prescriptions. At the same time, however, all parents know that their children are nothing if not complex and, therefore, that absolutes are either unreliable or in short supply. When it comes to parenting, context is paramount, because just about every conflict between a teenager and a parent boils down to a dispute as to context. (She wants the car so that she and her friends can go to a party, but you are worried about her driving at night and who those friends are.) This is the reason that you can use, not a manual, but a field guide. You will grow to appreciate the complexities of teenagers in general and will empathize with and influence your own children in particular. One further consequence is that you will realize how your children are, despite contrary signals, committed to a relationship with youãbut committed to a redefined kind of relationship.

Copyright Joseph Di Prisco and Michael Riera