From Magical Child to Magical Teen: A Guide to Adolescent Development

Description

Something is supposed to happen during the adolescent years - something greater than MTV, video games and the Internet. Joseph Pearce describes this something as the natural mandate for post-biological development - the development of the sexual and spiritual senses and expansion of our growth process outside of our bodies and into the physical world that surrounds us. Drawing on the stages of development outlined by Swiss biologist Jean Piaget and the brain research of neuroscientist Paul Maclean, Pearce demonstrates how nature has built into us an agenda for the intelligent unfolding of our lives. He offers a powerful critique of contemporary child-rearing practices and a groundbreaking alternative to existing perspectives on adolescence. FROM MAGICAL CHILD TO MAGICAL TEEN shows us how understanding nature's astonishing process of development, can unleash our greatest potential, as well as that of our children, so that we may experience our fullness in the manner nature has intended all along.

Joseph Chilton Pearce (1926-2016) is the author of The Death of Religion and the Rebirth of the Spirit, The Biology of Transcendence, The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, Magical Child, and Evolution's End. For more than 35 years, he lectured and led workshops teaching about the changing needs of children and the development of human society. He lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

"Praiseworthy. . . . Going far beyond his earlier Magical Child to explore the dysfunctions of culture, the promise of meditation, and the paradoxes of sexuality." * Library Journal * "He has pointed the way to an acceptance of the adolescent discovery of spirit as the normal start of a developmental path." * San Francisco Chronicle * ". . . visionary work from Joseph Chilton Pearce, who asserts that beginning to explore spirituality is the natural course of adolescent development." * Mothering, 06/03 *