Book review: Smart but Scattered Teens

This book covers how parents whose teens display weak “executive skills” should go about training their child to perform well both inside and outside of school. This book offers great advice on how to help your teen become more self-sufficient, more in control of their emotions, and more able to keep up with schoolwork.

This book reads like a conversation between you (the parent) and the author. It’s easy to read, and easy to understand. Also, it’s well organized, with clearly laid out chapters and subsections. The author uses a lot of lists, which makes it easy to skim through and find a certain section that may address a question that you in particular have. The author also uses many anecdotal dialogs to display points.

At points in the book, the author has included worksheets that you can fill you that help you regulate your progress with your teen. Also, at some points, helpful quotes from teenagers struggling with the same problems are added in the margins. These offer different opinions, ideas, points of view, and help flavor the book to keep it interesting.

This book takes a much different approach to solving attention disability problems. Whereas most choose to focus solely around organization or medication, this book addresses how a different approach to parenting might solve the problems that are more pronounced because of the effects of ADD. This book also very accurately communicates to the parent what’s going through their child’s mind, and how their child sees the world. This can solve a huge disconnect between parents and ADD children. Speaking from experience, this is something I would have hugely benefited from as a kid.

I would recommend this book to parents of teens who suffer the effects of ADD. I’ve already suggested my parents read it for dealing with my younger siblings.