Nine Ways to Empower Tweens by Kathleen Boucher and Sara Chadwick

Nine Ways to Empower Tweens #LifeSkills by Kathleen Boucher and Sara Chadwick
Buy Nine Ways to Empower Tweens by Kathleen Boucher and Sara Chadwick at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Confident Readers
Reviewer: Jill Murphy
Summary: Positive, accessible and constructive, this self help book for teens builds resilience as well as empowerment. Great stuff.
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 132	Date: December 2019
Publisher: Tellwell Talent
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-0228818823
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Nine Ways to Empower Tweens #LifeSkills by Kathleen Boucher and Sara Chadwick

9 Ways to Empower Tweens is a self-help book for tweens, setting out to show them vital #lifeskills. Don't groan! I know there is a market glut of such books for we grown-ups and for young adults too, but there is a needful space in an increasingly technological world accessible to younger and younger children for material for tweens too. There are nine short sections:

How to Speak Confidently
Start Each Day With Gratitude
Using Vision Boards, Big and Small
How to Defuse Anger and Frustration
Learning About Time and Focus
The Effects of a Good Work Ethic
First Impressions and Interviews
Self-Talk Matters
Start Each Day With Love in Your Heart

Each is written from the point of view of Emma and Elliott, who are twelve-year-old twins. They explain things in a simple and relatable way and in a positive voice. And each has an easy to follow exercise at the end - perfect both for individual readers and for teachers to adapt to classroom work. I particularly liked the exercise attached to the chapter about defusing anger: Write Away Stress, which not only provides an immediate way to vent angry feelings but also encourages tweens to pass this message on to friends it might help. Touches like this really make 9 Ways to Empower Tweens stand out.

I don't want to precis the whole thing but the book is genuinely full of practical wisdom and advice, from building resilience through affirming oneself and recognising intrusive thoughts, to making relationships of trust. And there are plenty of little humorous interjections to stop it from an overly worthy feel. There's a goldfish joke in there that made me laugh out loud. But I'm not telling you what it is: you'll have to buy the book to find out.

I have been a little bit worried of late that the word empowerment has been subject to a little bit of mission creep - that any form of self-expression is empowering, that actually doing anything that takes your fancy is also empowering. I don't think that's quite true. Human relationships are about give and take. Relationships are negotiations - but negotiations are only successful if you consider both yourself and the other person: Nine Ways isn't me-me-me like many other self-help/empowerment books. Empowerment isn't very empowering without resilience either. And so I absolutely loved this little book. It emphasises resilience throughout and it also places thoughtfulness at its centre. Children reading will come away with a good understanding that human beings have rights and responsibilities and that the key is achieving a healthy balance between them. As one of the endorsers of the book pithily puts it, the empowering here is showing tweens how to become lifelong learners and teachers.

I don't know about tweens, but I found it empowering myself! And in all the right ways.

Recommended. Highly recommended.

Older teens could look at the advice for modern adolescence in The Self-Esteem Team's Guide to Sex, Drugs and WTFs?!! by The Self-Esteem Team while anybody looking for something explicitly for teen boys could try Unzipped: A Toolkit for Life by Matt Whyman. You might also find this book interesting because of the way it encourages you to address difficult questions.

You can read more about Kathleen Boucher here.

Nine Ways to Empower Tweens by Kathleen Boucher and Sara Chadwick is in the Top Ten Self-Published Books 2020.

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