There’s as many wonderful, logical, educational and informative parenting books giving advice, support and help on how to raise a well-balanced teenager, as there are hormonal teenagers in fast cars, nits and lice in your local school and comatose teenagers sprawled out on the family couch.  These are truly marvellous books that instill faith in one’s parenting ability and give hope for their future.

Death by Teenager is not one of those books.

This is a witty, realistic account by battling Bad Mother Sonia Neale on how to dodge the many bullets her pubescent children can fire at her.  If Bad Mother’s Revenge popped the lid off perfect parenting myths, as an older, wilder mother she goes on to expose the harsh realities of mothering teenagers in the Internet Age.  She shares her experiences on:

Why thirteen is the age of The Exorcist.

How to survive family outings without making emergency calls to the Tactical Response Group or the family lawyer.

How to teach your teenagers that the person who hangs their undies on the line can also be of significant spiritual value in their lives.

Chasing cultured pursuits that don’t just involve cleaning the shower floor, it’s about global education, museums, art galleries and live theatre as well.

How menopause and puberty can co-exist in harmony in the same house at the same time, as long as you don’t clean your bike spokes with my linen tablecloth.

When you smugly think it’s only other parent’s teenagers having sex – think again!

She loves her children most of the time.  There’s Christopher, the Smartrider who can work out Fibonacci sequences and make his own Mobius strip but gets flummoxed figuring out how many cylinders in a V8 Commodore, while her eldest son Matthew, the Dreamer, not only knows how many cylinders a V8 engine has, he can build a Franken-scooter out of a pair of old bike tyres, some corrugated iron and a lawn-mower engine, but thinks a Mobius strip is a form of pornographic dancing. And her daughter, Melissa, the Wild Child, who plays complicated guitar riffs, reads heavy psychological books and works as a gourmet chef.

Sex, food, money, messy bedrooms, therapy, literature and love. Sonia ranges over all the big subjects with a light touch and her own unmistakable slightly twisted outlook.

There are no thick, glossy magazines called My Beautiful Teenager, showing a proud, glowing mother cradling a couch-bound, well-fed, raggedy-jean-clad adolescent sleeping like a baby surrounded by pizza crusts with a teat covered coke bottle firmly wedged between their lips. No-one says: ‘Congratulations! It’s a teenager when they turn 13.’

There are many informative parenting books out there that offer support on how to raise a well-balanced teenager … This isn’t one of them.

"Sonia Neale is a Bad Mother who has written and broadcast for ABC720 Perth radio in Western Australia, and writes a regular column for “My Child” magazine."