Interview With Award-Winning Author, Parenting Expert, & LA Tribune Columnist Angela Legh

 
                            

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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About Brian Feinblum

This award-winning blog has generated over 6,200,000 page views. With 5,600+ posts over the past 15 years, it was named one of the best book marketing blogs  by BookBaby  http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs  and recognized by Feedspot in 2021 and 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. It was also named by www.WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.”  Copyright 2026.

 

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