What’s My Child Thinking? What’s My Teenager Thinking?

What’s My Child Thinking? & What’s My Teenager Thinking? Books

Parenting is hard, let’s start with that. Parenthood is a constant flow of new challenges as kids are always changing and developing. Reading good parenting books can be a great support when you’re experiencing new difficulties with your children or enter new stages of parenthood. In this blog post, I’ll share a couple of new parenting books from DK Books that I find really useful.

The books are called What’s My Child Thinking? and What’s My Teenager Thinking? and are both written by Tanith Carey with clinical psychologist Angharad Rudkin as consultant editor. Let’s have a closer look at these two titles.

What’s My Child Thinking?

New parents often think that the newborn days, weeks, months, and baby years will be the hardest part of the parenting journey and that it gets easier once your baby is not a baby anymore. This is not usually true. Your child might not need you physically as much, but they have lots of other needs that need to be met and go through lots of developmental phases that can come with their own challenges.

This book is such a useful resource to help make life as a parent a little bit easier. The book covers all developmental milestones between ages 2 and 7 years and lots of important topics like tantrums, sleep difficulties, sibling rivalry and many more.

We learn about the psychology behind the behaviour of children and how to best respond and talk to your child. There are more than 100 everyday situations in the book with step-by-step scenarios, helpful advice and practical ideas. The book is nicely laid-out and organised by age, but the index and the table of contents also make it easy to find the topic you want to read about quickly. The book also includes helpful survival guides for critical times.

It’s a really positive book to guide you through these early years of parenting. At the start of the book, there’s a little quiz about your own childhood which I think is a great idea as it makes you reflect on your own upbringing and how this impacts you in your parenting.

Buy your copy of What’s My Child Thinking? here.

What’s My Teenager Thinking?

I have not got any teenagers yet but, at some point in the future, I will have three teenagers at the same. I still remember what it was like being a teen myself and I grew up with three sisters so have seen lots of different teenage behaviours.

Lots of things happen in a teenager’s body and brain as hormones surge through the body. It’s time for independence, making your own decisions and growing up. It’s difficult for teenagers themselves and also hard for many parents of teenagers too.

This book is all parenting through the teenage years, 13 to 18, common teenage behaviours and what they mean and how best to respond as a parent, now and in the long run.

Just like the book above, there are over 100 everyday scenarios with real-world problems and practical solutions and responses that you can use to guide you. It covers lots of important topics and helps you be a supportive parent that your teen will hopefully communicate with.

The book also has a section about your own life as a teen and survival guides to help you through tough situations like exams and conversations on topics such as consent.

Buy your copy of What’s My Teenager Thinking? here.

Both very helpful, brilliant books! I would love to see one for the age group in between, 8-12, too in this series.

Also read:

• Mums and Teen Sons – 10 Things You Can Do Together
• Activities for Teens – 88 Things for Bored Teenagers to do at Home
• How to Live with a Teenager: 6 Common Teenage Problems and Solutions You Need to Know
• 30 Conversation Starters to Improve Communication with a Teenager

These books were kindly gifted for reviewing purposes. As always, all my reviews are 100% honest and all thoughts and opinions are my own.