The Books

Three books, all written for the teenager rather than for the adult, all by the same person who writes these pages. This is the only page on the site where all three are in one place, and that is deliberate.

Nothing below is going to be sold to you. The site works whether or not any of these exist, and if you read the whole thing and buy nothing, it has done its job.

Teen Social Skills: The Confident Teen Playbook

Forty named techniques for starting a conversation, keeping one going, and holding your ground. Written to be read alone, in the reader's own language, without an adult explaining it.

Who it is wrong for. A teenager whose difficulty is not knowing what to say. If they already know what to say and cannot get it out, this is the wrong one of the three and the next one is closer.

Teen Social Skills: For Teens Struggling With Social Anxiety

The same forty-technique structure, rebuilt for the reader whose problem is not the words but being able to say them.

Who it is wrong for. Anyone looking for treatment. This is a book, not a course of anything, and it does not pretend otherwise. If a teenager is avoiding enough of ordinary life that it is costing them school, friendships or sleep, the useful next step is a proper evaluation, and the section on whether that is warranted yet walks through how to work that out and what it tends to cost.

The Friendship Handbook for Teens

Forty chapters on finding your people, joining a group that already exists, and what to do when a friendship ends. The ending is given real weight rather than a closing chapter. Losing friends is the thing a fifteen year old came looking for help with, and it is routinely the thinnest section in books of this kind.

Three pages in the making-friends and when-it-goes-wrong sections link to this one, after their sources.

What a book does that a website does not

The difference is who is reading and how.

This site is built to be searched. You arrive with one question, you get it answered in the opening lines with the source underneath, and you leave. That is the right shape for an adult in the middle of a worrying week.

A book is built to be gone through in order, by the person it is about, with nobody watching. That makes it a different object entirely. A sentence lands differently on a page than it does coming out of a parent's mouth at the kitchen table, even when it is word for word the same sentence. That is not the parent being wrong. It is who is saying it.

Where these are not allowed to go

The rules are set out in full on editorial standards. The short version:

• Never in the section written for teenagers. A teenager reading about having just lost their friends is not a sales opportunity, and that is the rule most likely to get quietly relaxed later, so it is written down.
• Never on a page carrying crisis details.
• Never on any page about paying for something, including every page about what things cost.
• Never more than one on a page, always below the sources.

Eight of the article pages carry a link to a book. The other twenty-six do not.

Things that will not happen here

No star ratings or review markup on a book by the person who runs the site. No invented reader quotes. No article that stops halfway through its own answer and sends you to a paperback for the rest of it.

Should any of those ever appear here, the page you are reading is no longer accurate, and pointing at it would be a genuine favour.