First Self-Empowerment Book Written By A Teen, For Teens | Care2 Healthy & Green Living

Alex Southmayd, a 12th grade student at Groton School in Massachusetts just released his first book, a self-help guide titled “Brain Snacks for Teens on the Go! 50 Smart Ideas to Turbo-Charge Your Life.”

Humans are always interested in looking, performing, and feeling better, but most self-help books are aimed at a more mature generation. Being a teenager himself, Southmayd is uniquely positioned to capture his own slice of the American self-help industry, which gathered $11 billion in 2009 alone.

With the proliferation of iPhones and texting, you might think that most teens would rather be caught dead than reading an actual book, but with depression, obesity, and teen suicide rates growing across the country, many are looking for help wherever they can get it.

Southmayd’s book seeks to avoid all the cliched terminology and spiritual aggressiveness that characterizes much of the self-help industry, and instead focuses on dealing with the issues that really matter to his peers.

As a teen himself, the author understands the pressures confronting teens today and jumps around covering all of them, from time management to acne, and from improving SAT scores( the author nearly has perfect SAT scores himself) to how drugs and alcohol damage the teenage brain.

Each of the book’s “Brain Snacks” brings together a variety of sources, from “my Headmaster at Groton School, Mr. Commons” to the American Medical Association, to illustrate a greater point.

Of course, simply handing your stressed-out teen a copy of this book won’t provide them with a magic road map for avoiding angst or getting into an Ivy League college, but it might help them to know that they’re not the only ones experiencing the woes of adolescence.

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Image Credit: Flickr – C.G.P. Grey

via care2.com