Abstract

Again and again, young people return to the question, "Am I the same as other people or am I different?" It's a difficult question to answer. Everyone knows that they're the same as other people in lots of ways yet they suspect that they might also be different. Or they want to be different... Or they accuse other people of being different... Or they get beaten up for being different...

This book is about young people trying to find answers, or at least trying to live more comfortably with the question. Using dozens of recognisable vignettes, Luxmoore explores young people's anxieties about ordinariness and extraordinariness, anxieties that affect everything: their behaviour, choices, relationships, happiness. He describes ways of working supportively and imaginatively with young people so that they can begin to find a better balance, enjoying their lives and achieving all sorts of things without losing sight of the fact that - underneath everything and like everyone else - they're ordinary, and there's nothing wrong with that.

This original and thought-provoking book will enable professionals in counselling, teaching, youth work and youth justice to support young people struggling with these anxieties and the eternal question, "Am I normal?"

It is short but enjoyable read, well written and masterfully told.
Journal of Mental Health
Overall, this text promotes considerations of professional practice on a number of levels and gently balances the professional and the personal on the same plane. As it is based around the school context it offers these considerations from a context and system well known to Educational Psychologists, thereby making this text, both a reflective and engaging read.
Debate
Nick Luxmoore is a school counsellor, trainer, teacher, youth worker and UKCP registered Psychodrama psychotherapist. He has over 30 years' experience of work with young people and with the professionals who support them. He has previously published Listening to Young People in School, Youth Work and Counselling; Working with Anger and Young People; Feeling like Crap: Young People and the Meaning of Self-esteem and Young People in Love and in Hate, all published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers. He currently works as the College Counsellor at King Alfred's College, Wantage.
This is an excellent book. Its 14 chapters -some quite short- are thoughtful and stimulating, theoretically sound but grounded in real life, lucid and readable. For those of us who want to understand a little better what makes our children and young people tick -not to mention ourselves- it has much to offer. I hope it will be widely read.
Pastoral Care in Education: An International Journal of Personal, Social and Emotional Development
The book will serve as a useful reminder, for professionals working with young people, of the complex contradictions that are often especially present during the teenage years... it is thought provoking and will make a useful resource for practitioners, particularly counsellors or those working in therapeutic relationships with young people.
Youth in Mind
As someone who works with quieter, more withdrawn young people, I was particularly drawn to this book. Many of them wish to feel special, loved, uniquely valued, but at the same time they want to fit in and not feel weird or totally different from their peers... I could see how these stories could be used to discuss issues with young people to help them work towards their own solutions - help them to see that they are both very similar to and yet, each in their own way, quite different form anyone else.
Children & Young People Now
This is very readable book offers insights into some of the behaviours and attitudes of youngsters as they struggle to reconcile their need to be "special" or extraordinary with their desire to be normal... Bullying, teenage depression and rebellion can all be due to the tension between wanting to stand out and blend in, and the book describes ways of working with young people to help them find a balance that enables them to achieve while accepting their own ordinariness. This is aimed specifically at counsellors, but I found it enlightening as it explained some of the teenage behaviours that can seen so baffling and self-destructive.
The SL (School Librarian)