First love Guiding teens through relationships and heartbreak

Phillips follows up her memoir, Unrequited (2015), with this guidebook for parents of teens wading into new emotional waters, providing them with solid instruction, tips for healthy modeling, and recommended communication strategies. Chapters cover early crushes, the typical trajectory of nascent relationships, signs of unhealthy patterns and abuse, unique challenges for queer and nonbinary teens, and ways to provide support when a relationship ends. Phillips combines her personal experience, expert advice, and interviews with a diverse range of perspectives via case studies. The guide identifies the all-consuming and mercurial range of adolescent emotions, which require delicate handling. It also reminds parents to consider conditions in today's sociopolitical climate that may differ vastly from what they themselves experienced. Phillips concedes that peer support is highly valued and valuable, but mature guidance from caring adults may be better suited to handle problematic or abusive situations. With a reassuring tone and a wonderfully inclusive spectrum of relationship scenarios, Phillips provides realistic and helpful advice reflecting today's culture and specific challenges for the newly enamored.

Excerpt © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Excerpt from the Introduction First Love is a book about young people's early forays into the maelstrom of crushes, dating, relationships, love, and the various forms of quasi relationships--friends with benefits, hookups, "situationships"-- they're likely to face in their teen and college-aged years. In these pages, you'll read about how these experiences enliven and test young people emotionally, ethically, and socially; why the quality of their relationships matters to their well-being, now and in the future; and how they contend with the influence of their parents, peers, and communities. Sex is part of the story, of course, but this is pointedly not a book that focuses on sex. There's already a great body of resources out there on teens and sex; I recommend several in the bibliography. Sex tends to take up all the air in the room, putting a distant second the emotional dimensions of adolescent relationships. Here, I'm putting feelings first. I view the beginning of a young person's love life--a term that has a sexual connotation, but I'm reclaiming it as a phrase that applies whether sex is in the picture or not--as a meaningful rite of passage. Afterward, young people won't be the same. Neither will their parents, and you'll also hear from them. This rite of passage, I've found, is a dual-generation one. Once a child's love life begins, parents won't be the same, either. Relationships transport an adolescent out of childhood and into the vulnerability and risks of intimacy. First loves illustrate the impossibility of protecting your child from loss and the inevitability of letting go. The beginning of a love life gives parents a glimpse into their emotional legacy and may lead them to reckon with time and age and life choices. In the bloom of youth, their children are living out all their romantic "firsts": first crush, first rushes of desire, first love, first sexual experiences. Parents, meanwhile, can't live these firsts all over again, as much as they might want to. Also from the Introduction While the book provides guidance on how parents and other adults can support young people, its most profound insights come from young people themselves. From them, I learned that, though it's worthwhile for the adults in their lives to remember what it was like to be young and in love, those reminiscences won't be enough if we want to fully support today's teens. We need to know what teens are going through now. Excerpted from First Love: Guiding Teens Through Relationships and Heartbreak by Lisa A. Phillips All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.