About Crossing the Room

Everything here is written by Jenna Hale. That is a pen name. It also sits on the cover of three books for teenagers about getting along with other people.

One person picks the questions, reads the sources and writes the pages. There is no team.

She raised two sons through their teenage years. They are in their twenties now.

That is the whole of it, and it is worth being exact about what it does and does not buy. It means she has sat in a car outside a school knowing something had gone wrong that day and not knowing what. It does not mean she can tell you what is going on with your teenager, and no amount of it would.

She is not a clinician, a therapist, a school counsellor or a psychologist. She holds no licence, no certification and no degree in any of this, and there is no version of this page where those appear later. On a site read by worried parents, and by teenagers, an invented credential would be the worst single thing it could carry.

What she does instead is read the sources, write down what they actually say, and mark the places where nobody has a good answer. That is a smaller claim than the sites competing with this one make. It is also one you can check, which is the point of the editorial standards page.

What is not behind this site

No clinical licence. No psychology or psychiatry qualification. No counselling training, no teaching certificate, no school or district role, no legal training.

That list sits at the top rather than the bottom on purpose. Writing about lonely or anxious teenagers arrives dressed in authority far more often than it earns any, and letters after a name are trivially easy to imply and awkward for a reader to verify. You have no way to audit mine except by taking my word. So here is the word: there are none to audit.

What that rules out is easy to state. Nothing here assesses anyone. No article can say what is going on inside your own household, for the obvious reason that it cannot see it. Where a question really does need a professional to answer it, the pages set out how to get one and who to go to, and then they stop.

Why there are two front doors

Most of this site is written to a parent. One section is written to the teenager.

Those are genuinely different jobs and pretending otherwise produces writing that fails both. A parent reading at eleven at night wants to know whether this is ordinary, what they can actually do, and whether they are about to have to pay somebody. A fifteen year old reading on a phone wants none of that, can tell instantly when something was written to be approved of by an adult, and stops reading the moment they smell it.

So the teen section follows different rules. It is written in the second person. It does not tell anyone that everyone feels like this. It does not offer advice on managing a conversation with a parent. And it carries no book links at any point, because a teenager reading about having just lost their friends is not an opportunity.

The parent side does not push anyone toward it either. It is there if they find it.

The books, said plainly

Three books, all for teenagers, all by the same person who writes these pages.

Eight of the article pages link to one of them, always after the sources and never above the answer. Roughly three quarters of the articles link to nothing at all. The section about paying for things carries no book link anywhere in it, which is the rule that costs the most and is the one most worth keeping.

They are listed on the books page, which is the only page where all three appear at once. Nothing on this site depends on anybody buying any of them.

The test you can run

Every page here has to answer its own question completely, in the opening lines, whether or not you ever spend a penny.

You can check that in about fifteen seconds. Open any page here. Look at whether the question in the title has been settled by the end of the opening block, well above the point where anything purchasable turns up. A page that withholds part of its answer so something else looks necessary is a broken page, and telling me is the useful reply.

The rules each page is held to are written out in full on editorial standards. That includes the list of claims this site refuses to print, and the narrow thing a date at the top of a page is actually asserting.