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| About the Author | xi |
| Preface by Meg Harris Williams | xiii |
| Book One: Your Eleven-Year-Old | 1 |
| Introduction | 3 |
| Chapter One: The Eleven-Year-Old and School | 5 |
| Starting secondary school. How parents can help. The strains of competition and refusal to go to school. Edward: feeling lost and deprived of identity. Learning and competition. Comparison with others. When to help. Parents' attitudes. School discipline: the uses of rules. | |
| Chapter Two: Hobbies and Interests | 15 |
| Collecting, keeping pets, games. Games and character. Mark: playing out sibling rivalries. Enthusiasms and crazes. Anne and her horse book. Reading—suspending judgment about the right choice of literature. Television and conversation. |
| Chapter Five: Gratitude, Courtesy, and Developing Consideration for others | 41 |
| Behaviour towards the rest of the family. Setting an example: genuine courtesy. Religion, where does it come in? Cheating with other children and at school. Margaret's divided mind and the significance of “playing fair”. |
| Chapter Six: Your Eleven-Year-Old and Sex | 49 |
| Curiosity about sex: a new shyness. Unspoken collusion in parents. Menstruation: Jenny and its prestige value. Masturbation and “wet dreams”. Physical changes and appearance. |
| Chapter Seven: The Need for Friends and for Time to be Alone | 57 |
| Conformity with other children. Privacy and the ‘grown up world’ of school. Family conflicts and friendships outside the family. Elsie's parents become a couple again. |
| Chapter Eight: Some Eleven-Year-Olds in Difficulty | 63 |
| Persistence of childi |