Terri Apter Ph.D.

Terri Apter, Ph.D., is a writer and psychologist and Fellow Emeritae of Newnham College, Cambridge. Her most recent book is Passing Judgment: Praise and Blame in Everyday Life. Her research focuses on family dynamics and work/family balance. She is the author of Altered Loves: Mothers and Daughters During Adolescence (a New York Times Notable Book of the Year), and The Confident Child: Raising Children to Believe in Themselves which won the Delta Kappa Gamma Society International Educator's Award in 1998. She explored young people's difficult transition to adulthood in The Myth of Maturity: What Teenagers Need from Parents to Become Adults (2002) in which she coined the now familiar term "thresholders" to identify young people stuck at the threshold to adulthood. Her recent book You Don't Really Know Me (featured in People magazine as the "Buzz Book" of the week) takes a fresh look at the familiar and baffling conversations that erupt between adolescent daughters and their mothers. Writing in The Independent on Sunday, Marina Cantacuzino remarked, "Terri Apter‘s book is both a balm for my savaged feelings and a useful compass in this maze." Her book The Sister Knot was described in the TLS as having "enormous explanatory value, both for those who have sisters and those who do not." O Magazine said that her most recent book "What do you want from me? learning to get along with in-laws" "should be stamped READ BEFORE WALKING DOWN THE AISLE." Difficult Mothers: understanding and overcoming their power was declared in the Times Higher Education Supplement to be "required reading during pregnancy". Her new book Passing Judgment: Praise and Blame in Everyday Life is published by Norton.