What can schools do to promote a healthy lifestyle to young people growing up today? The authors of this book acknowledge that health education must compete with other pressures on school and community work, but argue strongly for its importance. The book reviews recent research on adolescent health, setting it within theoretical frameworks, such as lifestyle development, health education models and styles of intervention. It raises many important issues for professionals working with young people in both school and community contexts.

Young people do not on the whole speak for themselves: they are spoken for by adults. Most research and policy agendas relating to young people are dominated by adult concerns about young people's health - rarely are the issues looked at from young people's perspective. This gap in our knowledge may be a critical factor in explaining some of the problems that health educators face in getting young people to transform health knowledge into action. Based on their own research, Shucksmith and Hendry relocate the issues to a young person's perspective and provide recommendations about initiatives relevant to a wide range of professionals and researchers involved in the health education of young people.

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"Young People's Leisure and Lifestyles" examines the importance of leisure in the socialization of young people. The findings quite clearly show the significance of leisure time, when different forms of self-expression emerge, and in particular, with the opportunity to socialize outside the family, self-identity begins to be defined in new ways. Drawing on the results of a major seven-year longitudinal study involving 10,000 young people, the authors closely analyze issues concerning young people in school, home, leisure and work settings. They look, for instance, at young people in the context of the family and explore the impact of parenting style on lifestyle development. Other topics considered in relation to young people's development include and analysis of social class and occupational trajectories, "risk" behaviours and adolescent health and well-being, sports participation, and the formation of friendship groups and the importance of peers across the adolescent years. Importantly, the authors also assess whether class and gender relations override youth culture, values and behaviour as the determining factors of youth lifestyles.