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Generation Risk: How to Protect Your Teenager From Smoking and Other Risky Behavior

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Corky Newton speaks with an authentic and knowledgeable voice, as a mother, and as a tobacco company executive. Transcripts of interviews conducted with teenagers across the country helps us understand these baffling and alien people that we nevertheless love, cherish and pin our hopes for the future on. Her description of the sensual pleasures of opening a fresh pack of cigarettes and taking a first puff made this ex-smoker nostalgic.

Todays's teenagers face an ever increasing array of real and dangerous risks. A friend of mine's teenage son was offered drugs for sale three times one Saturday afternoon in San Francisco, and she was with him! The portrayal of teenage behavior in the movie Traffic is tragically real for some.

Ms. Newton shows us how to communicate with our teenagers, with honesty and integrity being one key, and avoidance of the word "don't" being another. From her own experience she tells of how she reacted to finding cigarettes in her son's backpack and learning of her daughter's tongue piercing, over the telephone. She discusses clearly the facts about smoking, addiction and disease although these in and of themselves are not effective in preventing many teens from smoking.

Her final chapter contains twenty-seven suggestions to help prevent teenagers from smoking and engaging in other self-destructive risk taking behavior. I wish I could send them to every parent. I have to my daughters for my not yet teen grandchildren, and to my friends with teenagers. I encourage them to share this remarkable book with their teenage children.

In Generation Risk: How To Protect Your Teenager From Smoking And Other Dangerous Behavior, Corky Newton reveals the extent to which the tobacco industry seeks to entrap adolescent children into addiction. These insidious efforts are abetted by a teen's immaturity, access to indulgences (especially through the Internet), and the mixed cultural messages generated by entertainment and peer group pressures. Corky goes on to inform concerned parents what they can do to help their teenage son or daughter respond to the formidable forces of their peers and culture in order avoid entrapment into addictive and self-destructive behaviors and fads, foremost of which is smoking, drinking, and the use of drugs for recreational purposes. A very highly recommended addition to personal and community library parenting reference collections, Generation Risk combines solid psychological strategies with hard facts and data, outlines highly useful "refusal" skills; and will enable a parent to communicate effectively and persuasively with their son or daughter.