1. What inspired you to write this book?
Every book I have written has grown from the same
root: a deep conviction that children are not flawed. Their behavior is not a
problem. Behavior may be the only language available to a child whose feelings
have grown too large for words, whose inner world is asking for help the only
way it knows how.
What inspired this particular book was the recognition
of a gap: a quiet, consequential gap in what is available to parents. There are
excellent books about early childhood, and there are books for navigating the
teenage years. But the years between nine and fourteen, the years when identity
begins forming and friendships begin to carry enormous weight and a child's
inner world becomes more complex than it has ever been, those years have
largely gone unaddressed.
I also found myself thinking about the inheritance
parents carry into their relationships with their children. So many of the
adults I have spoken with over the years grew up in homes where emotions were
minimized, dismissed, or simply never named. They were taught, through
thousands of small moments, that feelings were something to manage or push
aside rather than understand. They carried those patterns forward, as most of
us do, because patterns do not require our conscious agreement to continue.
They simply travel from one generation to the next.
This book was written to offer parents a way of seeing
their children’s behavior makes sense, so that the moment a bedroom door slams
or a child falls silent at the kitchen table becomes something a parent can
meet with understanding rather than confusion.
2. What exactly is it about, and who is it
written for?
The Emotional Landscape of the Tween Years is written
for parents of children between the ages of nine and fourteen, though
educators, counselors, and anyone who walks alongside children during this
season of life will find it equally relevant.
The book explores the inner emotional world that
shapes a child's behavior during the tween years. It moves through four
territories. The first is the emotional inheritance: how generational patterns
of emotional repression travel through families and quietly shape the climate
children grow up in. The second is the inner world of children themselves: how
they interpret experience, form beliefs about who they are and whether they
belong and communicate what they feel through behavior rather than words. The third
is the social world tweens navigate: friendship hierarchies, belonging,
identity, the relentless visibility of digital spaces, and the profound
conclusions children draw about themselves within all of it. The fourth is the
role of the aware parent: how emotional safety is built, how disconnection is
repaired, and how a parent's own willingness to understand their child's
experience becomes the foundation of everything.
At its heart, the book makes a simple argument:
behavior is emotional communication. When a parent can read that language, the
path forward becomes clearer for both of them.
3. What do you hope readers will get out
of reading your book?
I hope parents finish this book and begin to see the
threads of repressed emotion that have unconsciously shaped their own lives.
And I hope that seeing those threads gives them something to offer their
children: a way to feel what they feel, to say what they carry, and to move
through it rather than around it.
I want them to look at the moments that have felt most
bewildering: the slammed door, the silence, the reaction that felt far larger
than the moment that caused it. And see something different there. Not a child
who is difficult, but a child who is trying to tell us something. Perhaps they
are too overwhelmed to find the words. Perhaps they have not yet identified
what they are feeling, so there are no words to reach for. Or perhaps they have
simply stopped trusting that the words will be received. Behavior steps in when
all of those doors feel closed.
I hope parents come away with greater compassion for
their children and, perhaps unexpectedly, for themselves. So much of what we
bring to our parenting we received as children. Emotional patterns handed down
through homes where feelings were dismissed or ignored, where children learned
that certain emotions were safer to hide.
Recognizing that inheritance is not a path to blaming
your parents. When you truly understand where those patterns came from, you
begin to see that your parents did not have the tools to do anything different.
They gave what they had. And that understanding becomes the very thing that
allows you to choose something new, not just for yourself, but for your
children.
And I hope they leave with something practical as
well, particularly the Feel and Free Method: a simple body-based approach to
helping children experience their emotions rather than becoming trapped in the
mental replay that prolongs emotional pain.
Most of all, I hope parents finish this book feeling a
little less alone in the work they are doing. Raising a child through these
years is profoundly demanding. Understanding helps. And understanding, offered
with warmth, changes everything.
4. How did you decide on your book's title
and cover design?
I had been thinking for a long time about how to
describe what happens inside a child between the ages of nine and fourteen. It
is not a single event. It is not a crisis, though it can feel like one to a
parent standing at the edge of it. It is a terrain: shifting, complex, full of
invisible forces that shape where a child places their feet and how safely they
walk.
The word landscape felt exactly right. The landscape
has geography. It has high places and low ones, open meadows and dense,
difficult ground. It has weather. And it can be read, if you know how to look.
The title became an invitation to do exactly that: to read the landscape of a
child's emotional world rather than react to the surface behavior.
As for the cover, the
design is still in development, and I am approaching it with the same care I
brought to the title. The book is meant to feel warm rather than clinical,
literary rather than prescriptive. The cover should feel like something a
parent reaches for at the end of a long day.
5. What advice or words of wisdom do you
have for fellow writers, other than run!?
Write what you cannot stop thinking about. That sounds
simple, and in a way it is. But there is a reason it matters. The books that
truly reach people are the ones written from necessity: from the place in a
writer where something will not be quiet until it has been said. Readers can
feel the difference. They can feel when a book was written because the writer
had to write it, and they can feel when a book was assembled because a writer
thought it might sell.
I would also say: trust the slow parts. The chapters
that move like difficult weather, the days when nothing comes. Those are part
of the work. They are often where the deepest thinking happens, beneath the
surface, in a place the writer does not have direct access to yet. Keep showing
up anyway.
And read. Read widely. Read the writers who do what
you wish you could do and read the ones who do something entirely different.
Reading teaches writing the way no craft book can.
Write toward your reader. Know who they are. Know what
they are carrying when they come to your book. Write as if you are sitting at a
table across from them, saying something true and necessary. That intimacy,
that orientation toward another person's real life, is what makes writing
matter.
6. What trends in the book world do you
see, and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?
What I see, and what gives me genuine encouragement,
is that readers are hungry for books that speak to the whole person. There is a
growing appetite for books that are emotionally intelligent, that treat the
reader as someone capable of depth and reflection. The success of books like
The Whole-Brain Child and The Conscious Parent reflects something real: parents
want more than strategies. They want understanding.
I also see nonfiction moving toward a more narrative
form. The most resonant parenting and self-development books are increasingly
literary in their sensibility. They tell stories. They invite the reader into
scenes and moments rather than presenting information in a detached, clinical
voice. That shift reflects a deeper truth about how people actually learn and
change. We change through story far more readily than we change through
instruction.
As for publishing itself, I think we are in a period
of genuine transformation. Independent and hybrid publishing have become
legitimate pathways for serious authors, and the gatekeeping structures of
traditional publishing are loosening, slowly but meaningfully. What remains
constant, and what I believe will always remain constant, is that the books
that endure are the ones that are true. However, the industry shifts around
them, that will always be what matters most.
7. Were there experiences in your personal
life or career that came in handy when writing this book?
The most important experience I brought to this book
was in my own family. My father was a raging alcoholic. For a long time that
was simply the fact of him, his anger shaped our home and created the distance
between us. But understanding came from an unexpected place. My aunt told me
once that her brother had been a very sensitive child. That single sentence
opened something.
My father was born in 1925, into a world that had no
room for a sensitive boy. Feelings were weakness. Sensitivity was something to
be corrected, not held. He was rejected for who he was before he ever had the
chance to understand who that was. Alcohol became the way he managed what he
was never allowed to feel. His rage, his behavior while drunk, caused him to be
rejected by his wife and his children. And the cycle moved on to the next
generation.
That is generational trauma. Not a clinical term, but
a living thread running through real families, including mine. My aunt's words
about a sensitive little boy gave me the understanding that cracked the story
open, and that understanding is woven through every page of this book. I did
not write this from a safe distance. I wrote it from the inside of it.
8. How would you describe your writing
style? Which writers or books is your writing similar to?
I write with compassion, hoping for transformation. I
want every sentence to feel like it was written by someone who believes deeply
in the reader's capacity to understand and to change.
My writing is narrative in its sensibility. I think in
scenes and in moments rather than in abstractions. Even when I am writing about
something like the physiology of emotion or the way generational trauma travels
through families, I reach for the specific and the human: a child at a kitchen
table, a parent standing in a doorway, the particular weight of a particular
silence.
In terms of comparable voices, I feel a kinship with
Shefali Tsabary's The Conscious Parent in its invitation for parents to turn
their awareness inward, and with Daniel Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson's The
Whole-Brain Child in its commitment to making neuroscience feel accessible and
warm. But I would also place myself alongside writers like Mary Pipher, whose
Reviving Ophelia brought deep compassion and literary intelligence to the inner
lives of young people, and Brene Brown, who understood that research could be
written with a storyteller's heart. I write for the parents
who read at the end of the day, when they are a little tired and a little
uncertain, and I want the experience of reading to feel like conversing with an
old friend.
9. What challenges did you overcome in the
writing of this book?
The greatest challenge was holding the complexity.
This book touches on generational trauma, emotional repression, the
neuroscience of emotion, tween social development, digital culture, eating
disorders, substance experimentation, and bullying. A landscape that is
genuinely vast. The challenge was to move through all of it without losing the
thread, without allowing the book to become a catalog of concerns rather than a
coherent and humane conversation.
There were also moments when writing required me to be
honest about things that are uncomfortable. About the patterns most of us carry
from our own childhoods, about the ways we unintentionally undermine emotional
safety in the people we love most. Writing that kind of truth requires both
courage and care. It would be easy to moralize, to assign blame, to make a
reader feel inadequate. I worked hard to hold the other possibility: that
awareness, offered with genuine compassion, opens something rather than closes
it.
And there were simply the ordinary challenges of
writing. The days when nothing comes, the chapters that resist, The particular
difficulty of writing about emotional experience in a way that brings
understanding without causing the reader to feel convicted.
10. If people can buy or read one book
this week or month, why should it be yours?
Because every day that you are unaware of the effects
of your reactions to your child's behavior in their emotional development means
that generational trauma may continue. The tween years are among the most
consequential in a child's emotional life. The conclusions they draw about
belonging, about their own worth, about whether the people they love can be
trusted with the truest version of themselves: those conclusions form quietly
during this time and carry forward into the decades ahead.
This book will help you see what is actually happening
beneath the surface of your child's behavior. It will help you understand the
emotional inheritance you carry and what it means for the climate your child
grows up in. It will give you a way of being present with your child in the
moments that matter most: the difficult ones, the quiet ones, the ones that are
easy to misread.
It will not offer you a list of techniques. It will
offer you something more durable than that: understanding. And understanding,
when a parent brings it into the room with their child, changes everything.
About The Author: Angela Legh is
an award-winning author, speaker, and advocate for children's emotional
development. She is the creator of The Bella Santini Chronicles, a fantasy
series that helps children explore emotional awareness through story, and the
author of the forthcoming parenting book, The Emotional Landscape of the Tween
Years. Angela writes a parenting column for the Los Angeles Tribune and
produces and co-hosts Unfiltered Parenting on Binge Network. Through her
writing, speaking, and media platforms, Angela helps parents and educators
understand the inner world of children so that behavior becomes easier to
interpret, and the conversations that matter most become easier to begin. For
more information, please see: https://angelalegh.com for parents and teachers, and https://bellasantini.com for kids.
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For
the past three decades, Brian Feinblum has helped thousands of authors. He
formed his own book publicity firm in 2020. Prior to that, for 21 years as the
head of marketing for the nation’s largest book publicity firm, and as the
director of publicity at two independent presses, Brian has worked with many
first-time, self-published, authors of all genres, right along with
best-selling authors and celebrities such as: Dr. Ruth, Mark Victor Hansen,
Joseph Finder, Katherine Spurway, Neil Rackham, Harvey Mackay, Ken Blanchard,
Stephen Covey, Warren Adler, Cindy Adams, Todd Duncan, Susan RoAne, John C.
Maxwell, Jeff Foxworthy, Seth Godin, and Henry Winkler.
His
writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s
The Independent (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/whats-needed-to-promote-a-book-successfully) and (https://pubspot.ibpa-online.org/article/10-things-my-dog-taught-me-about-marketing-books). He was recently interviewed by the IBPA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0BhO9m8jbs
He
hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America several years ago, and
has spoken at ASJA, three times at BookCAMP, Independent Book Publishers
Association, Sarah Lawrence College, Nonfiction Writers Association, Cape Cod
Writers Association, Willamette (Portland) Writers Association, APEX, five
times at Morgan James Publishing Red Carpet, and Connecticut Authors and
Publishers Association. He served as a judge for the 2024 IBPA Book Awards.
His
letters-to-the-editor have been published in The Wall Street Journal,
USA Today, New York Post, NY Daily News, Newsday, The Journal News (Westchester)
and The Washington Post. His first published book was The
Florida Homeowner, Condo, & Co-Op Association Handbook. It
was featured in The Sun Sentinel and Miami Herald.
Born
and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester with his wife, two kids,
and Ferris, a black lab rescue dog, and El Chapo, a pug rescue dog.
You
can connect with him at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianfeinblum/ or https://www.facebook.com/brian.feinblum
