Escaping the Endless Adolescence
How We Can Help Our Teenagers Grow Up Before They Grow Old
Chapter One
Is Twenty-five the New Fifteen?
As fifteen-year-old Perry shuffled into my office, with his parents trailing tentatively behind, he glanced at me with a strained neutral expression that I'd found usually masked either great anger or great distress; in Perry's case it was both. Although anorexia is a disorder most often associated with girls, Perry was the third in a line of anorexic boys I had recently seen. When he came to see me, Perry's weight had dropped to within ten pounds of the threshold requiring forced hospitalization, yet he denied there was any problem.
"He just won't eat," his mother began. Then, turning to Perry as if to show me the routine they'd been enacting, she asked with tears in her eyes, "Perry, why can't you at least have a simple dinner with us?" Perry refused to eat with his family, always claiming he wasn't hungry at the time and that he preferred to eat later in his room. Except that that rarely happened. New menus, gentle encouragement, veiled threats, nagging, a ...
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