For those of you keeping score at home we are both bursting at the seams with teens and tweens. Please send reinforcements in the form of Diet Coke and chocolate. Scratch that. We’re trying to be healthy. Just send lots of happy thoughts our way.

We jest, but there’s truth here too. These years leading up to and including the teens can be challenging for you, your kids, your sanity, and your bottom line. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a guidebook or ten to help you navigate these unfamiliar and sometimes hostile waters? How about some Sensible Sisters to talk you through it?

Well, we’ve got what you’re looking for! We are not promising that these books will solve all your problems but they are great guideposts to help you through the tween and teen years.

And if you need your middle school advice soundbite-sized, listen to our podcast at the end of this post!

Masterminds and Wingmen: Helping Our Boys Cope with Schoolyard Power, Locker-Room Tests, Girlfriends, and the New Rules of Boy World by Rosalind Wiseman

This is a parenting book that frankly anyone who spends any time around any boys age 11 through 18 needs to read. With over 200 interviews with boys and strong research guiding her conclusions, Wiseman draws the adolescent boy in sharp relief and gives us not only a true picture of the more complex lives of boys, but some ways we can help them through the next few years.

Our favorite insight? We do boys a disservice by dismissing their emotional lives as simple when they most assuredly are not. There is even a free e-book for boys themselves to read about what to do in difficult situations.

Wiseman is kind of a superhero. Or a superstar. In any case, she has written a book that can save you and any special boys in your life.

Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and the New Realities of Girl World by Rosalind Wiseman

And Wiseman works a similar magic for girls. Erin read this book when she first started teaching middle school and it fundamentally changed the way she looked at girls, their friendships, and their struggles with each other and themselves.

Wiseman offers sage, sound advice for how to guide girls towards treating themselves with dignity and grace and treating each other fairly, but there is so much more than that in this book. Understanding girl power plays, how boys fit into the big picture of girl relationships, and the different roles girls play really helps anyone who knows or loves an adolescent girl guide her to her best, most authentic self. Thanks again to the wonderful and very wise Wiseman.

The Wonder of Boys by Michael Gurian

We often scribble pearls of wisdom from what we’ve been reading. This quote from this book has become Erin’s talisman over the past few years:

“As our lives speed up more and more, so do our children’s. We forget and thus they forget that there is nothing more important than the present moment. We forget and thus they forget to relax, to find spiritual solitude, to let go of the past, to quiet ambition, to fully enjoy the eating of a strawberry, the scent of a rose, the touch of a hand on a cheek…”
― Michael Gurian, The Wonder of Boys

Michael Gurian shares his larger vision of how culturally we are failing boys by not acknowledging and thus not meeting their biological and spiritual needs. We both love books with a strong scientific bent that are also easy to read. This book meets those criteria and yet exceeds expectations too. It will be a beloved helpmate on the hormone highway you are now traveling.

The Wonder of Girls: Understanding the Hidden Nature of Our Daughters by Michael Gurian

This is a riveting read. Honestly. Bursting with excellent, updated scientific research about how girls develop, how their brains work, and how this all affects how girls relate to themselves and each other, this is as unputdownable as nonfiction gets. Ditto everything we said about The Wonder of Boys but yet uniquely wonderful in its own way. Magic.

The Drama Years: Real Girls Talk About Surviving Middle School — Bullies, Brands, Body Image, and More by Haley Kilpatrick

Anyone who has been anywhere near a middle school lunchroom knows that The Drama Years is the perfect title for a book about girls navigating the difficult tween years. This book is one of the best for helping you and your daughter through it.

Haley Kilpatrick is the founder of GirlTalk and she is on a mission to end the drama and change the outcome for our nation’s young women. Sharing her own personal anecdotes from middle school and drawing on conversations with middle school and high school girls about what actually happens and what helps, Haley Kilpatrick has created a book with real insights and a clear path for helping. You will love the real, honest talk and the great, usable advice.

Middle School Makeover: Improving the Way You and Your Child Experience the Middle School Years by Michelle Icard

We have already recommended this book so many times that we’re out of digits to tell you all the reasons we love it. But here are five.

First, Michelle Icard establishes herself from the very first page as a woman you can trust and want to share this journey with you. Warm and empathetic, Icard is also funny and real. You’ll wish you could invite her over for tea or, in Erin’s case, Diet Coke.

Second, as the creator of Athena’s Path and Hero’s Pursuit, social skills camps for middle school boy and girls, Icard has tons of real, practical solutions to share for lots of common middle school issues.

Third, we love this book’s central theme of shifting your parenting to the role of assistant manager. It’s such a recognizable, perfect metaphor for how your role needs to change during these years and she explains just how to do this perfectly.

Fourth, one of the best pieces of advice Erin ever received about parenting this age was to remain neutral when receiving information. Icard has given a great name to this strategy, “Botox Brow”, and she weaves in stories, examples, and advice for how to pull off this essential coping skill.

Fifth, Icard likes kids, even middle schoolers. We have that in common. She shifts the paradigm and the assumption that there is something wrong with kids at this age. Kids are just fine, but the way we have been dealing with them at this age has to change. She then goes on to give a ridiculous amount of ways to do help do this.

Honestly, we could go on, but you should just fire up the old credit card and order this one for yourself now.

So there you go: a collection of parenting books to keep you company through the next few years. Short of an endless supply of calorie-free chocolate, it’s the best option.