Straight-up, hard-hitting advice on parenting teenage boys Adolescent boys can be difficult to understand - barely communicating, isolating themselves, suggestable to drink and drugs. It's no surprise that parents worry about their sons growing up and how they'll turn out - and look for help to understand what their boys are going through. Celia Lashlie has the answers. After years of working in the prison service she knows what can happen when boys make the wrong choices. She also knows what it's like to be a parent. Throughout her years working as a researcher and social commentator, Celia has talked to hundreds of boys - what she found was surprising, amusing, and in some cases, frightening. In this funny, honest, no-nonsense book, Celia Lashlie reveals what goes on in the world of boys, and with clarity and insight, she offers parents - especially mothers - practical and reassuring advice on raising their boys to become good, loving, articulate men.

Celia Lashlie, justice reform campaigner and bestselling author, brings her powerful insight to the problems of families trapped in a spiral of crime, poverty and abuse. She points to the reasons behind why New Zealand's rates of imprisonment are so disastrously high, what the politicians and social service organisations could do to improve the plight of children in at risk families and why the system should protect be protecting them. Lashlie uses the case studies of Maka Renata and Bailey Junior Kurariki as examples of institutional neglect. She exposes the environment in which they live and the pedestals upon which the media and society place these people, and , and the negative attitudes of many within our bureaucracy work against the efforts of the children's mother to be the best mother she can. The Power of Mothers is a wake-up call to voter and politician, parent and grandparent, social agency and lobby group alike. We must do more than build prisons to hold the children we fail, now.