About This Site

Who writes this

Jenna Hale, which is the name I write teen life-skills books under.

What I am not

I am not a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a therapist, a counsellor, a social worker, a lawyer or a school administrator. I hold no clinical licence and no certification in anything on this site. Nothing here is an assessment of your child, and no page will tell you what is happening in your house, because I cannot know that and neither can anything you read on the internet.

I am stating this at the top rather than in a footer because the subject attracts a great deal of writing by people whose credentials are decorative, and because a fabricated credential on a site like this would be the worst thing on it.

What I actually did

I spent months on the book this site supports, and most of that time was not spent writing. It was spent reading the research behind the claims that get repeated about teenage anger, and finding that a surprising number of them do not survive being looked up.

The ninety-second rule is not a research finding. The number twenty-five is not a research finding. The venting study that everyone cites used a punching bag rather than a pillow, and it found that the group who sat quietly and did nothing came out least angry, with hitting the bag failing to help in any condition tested. Its subjects were 602 undergraduates rather than teenagers, so it is a caution rather than a measurement of anybody’s child. Those are not clever contrarian readings; they are what the papers say when you open them.

That work is the only thing that qualifies this site to exist. It is not expertise in adolescence. It is a stack of primary sources and a willingness to write down what they actually found, including when the honest answer is that nobody has measured it.

Why the site is written this way

Search almost any question a parent has here and count how many of the results are published by somebody selling the answer. Residential treatment providers write the pages about whether you need residential treatment. Programme sellers write the pages about what a programme involves. Law firms write the pages about school discipline.

None of them are lying. They are all answering a question they have a financial stake in, which is a different thing and produces a predictable distortion: everything looks slightly more serious than it is, and doing nothing is never on the list.

Nobody in that market can afford the sentence “you probably do not need this.” I can, so the site says it where it is true.

How it is paid for, and the thing to weigh

Nothing here is sponsored. No treatment provider, programme, law firm or app has paid for a mention or been offered one.

I wrote a book on this subject for teenagers, and five of the pages on this site link to it. That is a financial interest and you should weigh it. The rules I hold myself to: the book box never appears on a page carrying crisis resources, never on a checklist, and never on a page about paying for something. No page holds back its answer to make the book look necessary. If a page is only useful as an advertisement, it does not belong here.

You can test that. Pick any page and see whether it answers its question in the first two sentences.

About the numbers

Where a figure exists, it names its source and the period it was measured over, and it links out. Where no reliable figure exists, the page says so. That happens more often on this subject than you would expect, and saying so is more useful than filling the gap.

The editorial standards page sets out what the checked date means and what has to happen before it moves.