First Love is about teensâ experiences in the maelstrom of crushes, relationships, and breakups. It offers parents the information they need to navigate the complexities and challenges of their childâs first love and guidance on how best to support them on their journey through all of loveâs stages.
A critical resource for parents to help their teens through the perplexing world of love and heartbreak.
Todayâs young people are beginning their love lives in a time of rapidly changing ideas and ideals about identity, commitment, sexuality, and consent. For parents, the new realities of teenage relationships can be both mystifying and daunting.
In First Love: Guiding Teens through Relationships and Heartbreak, Lisa A. Phillips chronicles the challenges todayâs adolescents face as they navigate crushes, dating, and breakupsâ"and the challenges adults face as they strive to provide guidance and support. Phillips sheds light on how the relationships teens have today are different from their parentsâ generation, including their reliance on technology and social media, the rise of young people identifying as LGBTQ+, high rates of depression and anxiety, and consent consciousness. She provides concrete strategies and insights from experts and teens themselves on ways parents and other adults can help young people cope with the timeless issues of love and heartbreak.
Told from the perspective of a professor, mother, and award-winning journalist, First Love is a critical resource for parents, educators, mental health professionals, and others who want to understand the new realities of teen relationshipsâ"and help teens become caring, self-aware, and thriving young adults.
Industry Reviews
Adolescent romantic relationships are far from frivolous, and Lisa Phillips is a trustworthy and steady voice, readying parents to be the safe and present allies that teens need as they venture into dating. First Love brings alive how our teens experience and are shaped by romantic love, and serves as a validating and educational resource for parents looking to support their children (and themselves) through their adolescents relationships. This book belongs on the bookshelf of every parent. --Alexandra H. Solomon, PhD, faculty at Northwestern University, award-winning author of Love Every Day, and host of the podcast Reimagining Love Much has been written for parents about how to talk to their teens about sex. But surprisingly less has been written about how to talk to teens about love--which, after all, is the more important of the two. First Love fills this gap with insight and compassion for parents and teenagers alike. --Laurence Steinberg, professor of psychology at Temple University and author of You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10-25 With First Love, Lisa Phillips has written an exceptionally sophisticated, nuanced mediation on the complexity of young romance in the age of social media, smart phones, social isolation, gender fluidity, #metoo, widely accessible porn, rising levels of depression--you name it. With a novel emphasis on feelings--both on the part of the adolescents and the adults--she tracks the life cycle of first relationships, from crush to break-up, and the result is one of the best books Ive ever read about both parenting and parenthood. Phillips provides a new vocabulary and navigational tools for this bewildering new terrain, and what a service that is; what an eye-opener her work is to read. --Jennifer Senior, winner of the 2022 Pulitzer Prize and author of the New York Times bestseller All Joy and No Fun
