I just reviewed What They Don’t Teach Teens by Jonathan Cristall, Esq.
What a fabulous find for everyone, especially parents and teens. This book should be on every counselors, teachers, parents, bookshelf for guidance for all children , teens and adults alike!.
This book was written more like a guidebook. It was easy to comprehend and understand, especially with the use of the way the paragraphs were written, highlighted text, and visuals .
Please use this guidebook ,as a tool, to help with guidance on contemporary issues about cybercrime, harassment , cyber bullying, street and digital safety, sexual violence , and other forms of 21st century issues.
“What They Don’t Teach Teens” will help start and continue a meaningful dialogue within the classroom and at the dinner table.
It did not read like a textbook or like a novel. This book Is an informational type guidebook.
What They Don’t Teach Teens should be in middle school and high school students book bags. This is a great curriculum find for all educators.
I would love to see professional lesson plans to go along with this book.
Get your school administrative staff to order this for your districts. It’s a MUST!!!

Disclaimer: I received an ARC from NetGalley. These are my honest opinions.

"What They Don't Teach Teens" was well researched but poorly executed. Firstly, and most simply: the title does not do this book any justice. Nowadays, students ARE being taught online safety, students ARE being taught their rights, and unfortunately it has come to this, that students ARE being taught how to behave during school shootings. There is nothing wrong with this title because any further insight about these sensitive topics is appreciated, but you must know what you're getting into because the title is slightly misleading. Your teenager will not learn how to file taxes and turn on the washing machine from this book - rather, they will learn how to spot predators, remain civil with police officers, and maintain privacy on social media. Secondly, for a 344 page book, only 10% of it was credible information. The rest was nervous disclaimers from the author, way too many summaries and paragraph-length explanations, and just a bit too many anecdotes. I believe this comes from a vast misunderstanding of teenager's intelligence; it is true, Cristall is literally writing a book telling teenagers not to make stupid mistakes, but he is sharing this information in far too much depth. Teenagers will not respond positively to a three-page explanation of a one bullet point synopsis that explains it all. Horror stories shared by other teens will also not prove beneficial, they are more likely to scare teenagers into thinking anything they do online will be used against them. Circling back to the mentioned anecdotes, you will quickly learn that the author ran into trouble in high school, having been arrested and made lots of the mistakes he advises teens not to make in this book. Setting aside the hypocrisy (because everybody makes mistakes and it's nice to learn from his), this should make any readers weary of his advice. Of course, people grow and learn, but there is always a worry that the author "teaching" you the "only right way to deal with ____" is biased, and being arrested for committing a crime is a very climactic event that would definitely strengthen this bias. However, not all of this book is solely from Cristall's past experiences. To his credit, he did loads of research and surveying to collect quotes and information from professionals in the business, giving "What They Don't Teach Teens" much more credibility, All in all, "What They Don't Teach Teens" is a decent guide for teenagers but in my honest opinion, should not be the first priority on your TBR list.

This book really breaks down some very important lessons that are usually only learned the hard way. While some kids will still have to learn through life experience, this is going to be a great conversation-starter for our classroom to talk about some bigger issues that we teachers don't usually consider teaching. Already purchased a copy to use this year!