YA Nonfiction Skills

Companion Guide — Relationship Skills For Young Adults

Author: RJ Barranco Audience: grades 9–12, college first-year, adult learners working on relationship-skills explicitly, peer-mediation programs, advisory contexts Reading level: approximately Lexile 1000–1150; conversational YA register with embedded clinical and family-systems literature Length: 13 body chapters + introduction + author’s note + conclusion + sources + about + 2 appendices (Scripts; For Parents) Best fit for: SEL programming, Health Education (relationships, mental health, family-life education strands), advisory periods, peer-mediation programs, Title IX-adjacent prevention curriculum, college first-year experience, family-life education, school-counselor curriculum support, transition-planning programs, special-education social-skills programming

This guide is free for non-commercial educational use. Adapt and distribute locally without permission.

About the classroom toolkit

This companion guide is the free educator overview — freely shareable for non-commercial educational use. The full chapter-by-chapter classroom toolkit — lesson plans (~180 minutes per chapter, with minimum-viable runtimes), anchor-read excerpts, student worksheets, student-retained reference cards, project rubrics, Marp slide decks, quiz banks, standards-alignment crosswalks (CCSS / CASEL / AP / state CTE / ISTE), differentiation protocols, and teacher notes; twelve files per chapter, thirteen chapters — is a separate deliverable available to schools, districts, and programs adopting the book for classroom use. Given this book’s heavy safety content, the toolkit’s teacher-notes files include explicit mandated-reporter protocols, Title IX routing, and crisis-line escalation paths per chapter.

To inquire about adoption + toolkit access, contact skills@mojavepublishing.com. This companion guide stands on its own and is freely usable; the toolkit pack is the deeper material for adopting institutions.

Critical adopter notice (read this first)

This book contains the highest-stakes safety content in the YA Nonfiction Skills series. It covers dating abuse, sextortion and image-based abuse, self-harm threats, coercive control, suicide loss, affirmative consent, and the patterns by which “ordinary friendship/family/dating conflict” can shade into something coercive or dangerous.

The book handles all of these topics with care — crisis-line callouts are placed at the moment they’re needed (not buried in back-matter), every “talk to a trusted adult” callout includes a “if you really can’t tell a parent” fallback pathway, and every self-harm or abuse passage routes readers explicitly to professional resources. In-house sensitivity, legal, voice, and fact-check passes have all been completed, and the book has been reviewed against the most current public-record safety language.

Adopters should:

The Resources section at the back of the book lists every crisis line, hotline, and professional-referral pathway used in the book. Have it available during the unit.

What this book is and isn’t

What it is. A working manual for the relationship situations teens actually find themselves in: friends who only call when they’re in crisis, family drama where you’ve been cast in a role you didn’t choose, dating dynamics that drift into coercive territory before either person notices, social-media relationships and sextortion attempts, the guilt-trip that’s actually a manipulation, and the moments when you need to leave a relationship safely and don’t know how. The book is built around eight “boundary superpowers” — pedagogical scaffolding for teens who learn better with named frameworks — and treats the difference between caring deeply about someone and losing yourself in them as a learnable skill, not a personality trait.

What it isn’t. It is not a substitute for professional therapy, school counseling, or crisis intervention. It is not a Christian-relationships book, a secular-only book, a politically-positioned book, or a book that pretends one family configuration is normative. It is explicit about all of these stances. It is not a clinical text — the author is an educator and coach, not a licensed clinician, and the book routes anything past skill-building to the professionals who handle it.

What students will actually do with it. Recognize the difference between supporting a friend and being a friend’s unpaid therapist. Spot the family roles they’ve been cast in (the responsible one, the peacemaker, the screw-up) and start to choose whether to keep playing them. Tell affection from love-bombing in early dating. Recognize coercive-control dynamics before they escalate. Handle sextortion threats safely. Tell self-harm threats that need professional help apart from manipulation (and treat both with the same seriousness in the moment). Set boundaries with people who don’t accept boundaries. Leave relationships safely when leaving is what’s needed.

Curriculum alignment

For institutional adoption, the chapters most likely to anchor a unit are 1 (Emotional Backpack Test), 2 (Energy-Draining Friend Test), 7 (Dating Without Drama), 9 (Social Media Boundaries), and 11 (Guilt Buster). The remaining chapters work as extensions.

Sensitivity and content notes (chapter-by-chapter, expanded)

This is the longest sensitivity section of any guide in the series. Treat it as required reading before assigning.

Chapter-by-chapter teaching notes

Chapter 1 — The Emotional Backpack Test

Central concept: You can tell whether a relationship is healthy by what you’re carrying after spending time together. Energy, attention, emotional weight — track them. Some relationships fill the backpack; some empty it.

Best opening question: “After your last hangout with each of your three closest people, what was in your emotional backpack? Lighter or heavier?”

Activity: Backpack-tracking exercise. For one week, after every meaningful interaction with someone, students note (privately) whether they feel filled or drained. End of week: what patterns surfaced?

Chapter 2 — The Energy-Draining Friend Test

Central concept: Some friendships are reciprocal (energy flows both ways), some are episodic-imbalance (one person gives more in some seasons, then it switches), and some are chronically extractive (one person always takes). The chapter teaches teens to tell which category each friendship is in.

Best opening question: “Name a friend whose calls you dread answering. What specifically happens during the call?”

Activity: Friendship energy audit. Students rate their top five friendships on a reciprocity scale and discuss what actions are appropriate for each category.

Sensitivity: Self-harm sidebar at the chapter midpoint. Crisis line leads. Preview.

Chapter 3 — The Family Drama Detector

Central concept: Most families have recurring scripts — same arguments, same roles, same outcomes. Recognizing the script is the prerequisite for not playing your assigned part.

Best opening question: “What role does your family typically cast you in during conflicts — the responsible one, the peacemaker, the funny one, the screw-up? Did you choose it?”

Activity: Family-script mapping. Students map one recurring family conflict — who plays which role, how it usually ends, what would change if they refused to play their assigned part.

Sensitivity: Self-harm-in-family-fights callout. Religious-family-dynamics paragraph could use external sensitivity reader review for depth.

Chapter 4 — The Force Field

Central concept: Boundaries are not walls — they’re permeable structures that let some things through and stop others. Building the force field is learning what to let in, what to keep out, and how to enforce the distinction without becoming someone you don’t want to be.

Best opening question: “What’s a boundary you wish you’d had two years ago? What would you say to set it now?”

Activity: Force-field design. Each student picks one relationship and designs their own force field — what they let through, what they keep out, how they communicate it.

Chapter 5 — The Mind Shield

Central concept: Protection from psychological harm — manipulation, gaslighting, mental flooding — requires specific cognitive tools. The chapter teaches a small set.

Best opening question: “Describe a moment when someone made you doubt your own perception of what happened. How did you eventually figure out you weren’t crazy?”

Activity: Reality-checking practice. Students develop their personal “what just happened” checklist for moments when their perception is being challenged.

Sensitivity: “If You’ve Lost Someone to Suicide” sidebar. Alliance of Hope, AFSP, 988. “It is not your fault” framing. Preview.

Chapter 6 — The Truth Ray

Central concept: Honesty in relationships is more useful when it’s specific, well-timed, and tied to what you want to happen next. Vague honesty (“I just feel weird about this”) rarely lands. Specific honesty (“when you do X, I feel Y, and what I need is Z”) does.

Best opening question: “Pick a recent moment you wish you’d been more honest. What specifically would you have said?”

Activity: Honest-statement drafting. Students write three real honest statements they’ve been holding back. Use the chapter’s framework. Workshop with a partner before deciding whether to deliver any in real life.

Sensitivity: Abuse-disclosure response framing. Preview.

Chapter 7 — Dating Without Drama

Central concept: Most dating drama is preventable with a small number of skills: knowing what affection looks like vs. love-bombing, knowing what coercive control looks like in its early stages, knowing how affirmative consent actually works in practice, knowing when “leaving safely” is the right move and how to do it. The chapter walks through each in depth.

Best opening question: “What was the first relationship pattern in your own dating life (or someone close to you) that you wish you’d recognized earlier?”

Activity: Pattern recognition. Each student identifies one pattern from the chapter they want to be able to recognize in real time. Practice spotting it in fictional examples (movies, songs, cultural cases).

Critical sensitivity note: Highest-stakes chapter in the book. Crisis-line resources: loveisrespect, NDV Hotline, RAINN, Trans Lifeline. Self-harm sub-sidebar. LGBTQ+ inclusivity. Affirmative-consent framing tied to California SB 967. “Breakups are the highest-risk moment” framed factually. Have school counselor in the loop before assigning. Have clear protocol for student self-disclosure.

Chapter 8 — Friend Group Politics

Central concept: Friend groups are systems. They have power dynamics, in-group / out-group lines, recurring conflicts, and quiet rules about who’s safe to say what to. Reading the system makes you better at navigating it without becoming a casualty of it.

Best opening question: “What’s the unspoken rule in your friend group that everyone knows but nobody says out loud?”

Activity: Friend-group system map. Students (privately) map their friend group: who’s central, who’s peripheral, what the unspoken rules are, what would happen if those rules were broken. Discuss what mapping it changes.

Chapter 9 — Social Media Boundaries

Central concept: Online relationships obey different rules than offline ones. The chapter covers the specific dangers (sextortion, cyberbullying, parasocial drift, algorithmic distortion of friendships) and the specific skills (boundary-setting in DMs, recognizing escalation, knowing when to call in adults).

Best opening question: “What’s a social-media interaction you wish you’d handled differently? Walk through what happened — and what you’d do now.”

Activity: Online-pattern audit. Students identify one social-media dynamic they want to change in their own behavior and commit to it for two weeks.

Critical sensitivity note: Sextortion section is detailed. FBI / NCMEC / Take It Down resources. Closeted-LGBTQ+ teen vulnerability explicitly named. Organized-crime framing. “Can’t tell a parent” fallback present. Preview carefully.

Chapter 10 — The GPS Check

Central concept: Periodically checking where you are in a relationship — and where it’s heading — prevents the slow drift into dynamics you wouldn’t have agreed to up front. Quarterly relationship audits, in your head if not on paper.

Best opening question: “Pick a current relationship. Where were you with this person a year ago? Where are you now? Where will you be in another year if nothing changes?”

Activity: GPS audit. Students do the audit on three current relationships (privately). Discuss what surfaces.

Chapter 11 — The Guilt Buster

Central concept: Guilt is often weaponized in unhealthy relationships. The chapter teaches teens to tell guilt-as-information (“I did something wrong”) from guilt-as-manipulation (“they’re making me feel bad to control me”). The two need very different responses.

Best opening question: “Describe a time someone made you feel guilty about something you don’t actually think you did wrong. How did you tell the difference?”

Activity: Guilt audit. Students log every guilt trip they encounter for a week. Sort into information vs. manipulation. Discuss what surfaced.

Sensitivity: Self-harm-as-manipulation framing callout. “Take it seriously every time” wording. Preview.

Chapter 12 — Your Relationship Superpower Team

Central concept: The eight superpowers from earlier chapters work together. Knowing which one to deploy in which situation is the meta-skill the book is building toward.

Best opening question: “Which superpower do you need most right now? Which one comes most naturally? Which one would change the most if you got better at it?”

Activity: Personal toolkit assembly. Each student picks three superpowers to prioritize for the next month. Track real-life applications.

Chapter 13 — Conclusion

Closing arc: relationships are practice. Tools help. Sometimes the right move is leaving. You’re allowed to do the work.

Appendix A — Scripts

Single-page reference: ready-to-use scripts for the highest-frequency situations. Useful as a classroom handout during the relevant chapter.

Appendix B — For Parents and Caregivers

Carefully written to avoid liability traps. Does NOT instruct parents on handling teen-disclosed abuse — routes them to professionals. Read before sharing with families.

Discussion-question bank

(Use these carefully. Many of these surface vulnerable material. Establish ground rules before opening the floor.)

  1. The book uses the “emotional backpack” frame. After your last week, what was in yours?
  2. The book separates reciprocal friendships from chronically extractive ones. Where do you have each in your life?
  3. What role does your family typically cast you in? Did you choose it?
  4. What’s a boundary you wish you’d had two years ago?
  5. Describe a time someone made you doubt your own perception of what happened.
  6. The book argues vague honesty rarely lands and specific honesty usually does. Where in your life is that distinction true?
  7. What’s a dating pattern you (or someone close) wish you’d recognized earlier?
  8. The book is explicit that some relationships need leaving, not skill-applying. Why is that distinction important?
  9. What’s the unspoken rule in your friend group that nobody says out loud?
  10. What’s a social-media interaction you wish you’d handled differently?
  11. The GPS check chapter argues for quarterly relationship audits. Have you ever done one? Without the framework, what would the audit have surfaced?
  12. Where’s guilt operating as information in your life vs. as manipulation?
  13. Of the eight superpowers, which do you need most right now?
  14. The book is explicit that the author is an educator and coach, not a licensed clinician, and routes serious issues to professionals. Why is that distinction important?
  15. The book pairs sensitivity with directness. Where does the directness help? Where does it land hard?
  16. Pick one chapter to recommend to a friend. Which? Why?
  17. What does the book not cover that you wish it did?
  18. The book has crisis-line callouts at multiple points. What does it tell you that the author thought it mattered to put the phone number on the page rather than just in the back?
  19. Has the unit changed how you think about a specific relationship? Without naming the person, what changed?
  20. If you commit to one new practice from the book, what would it be?

Extension activities

Going deeper

For educators

For parents and family use

For students who want more

This companion guide is part of the free educational resources for the YA Nonfiction Skills series at skillsforyoungadults.org. Use, adapt, and share freely for non-commercial educational purposes. For commercial use (paid PD, curriculum-vendor licensing), contact the publisher.