By reading fiction designed for adolescents, teachers can learn how to help middle school children to resolve the conflicts characteristic of their lives. Analyses of 23 such books that focused on the ways that 10- to 16-year-old characters cope with a variety of problems and on the roles that adults play in causing or helping to alleviate those problems revealed five generalizations that seemed to hold true in all of the books. The generalizations are: the ways that children cope include the ways that adults cope with what is troubling or confounding; how children cope seems to be only loosely associated with their age and to be independent of their sex, racial or ethnic origins, social or economic status, or dwelling place; "success"--feeling better about oneself, stronger, more capable, more knowledgeable--is linked with all ways of coping; typically, the books show changes in ways that help characters to gain greater control over their lives; and adults who are informed, sensitive, patient, or loving helpers are more often neighbors or strangers than parents or teachers. Indeed, parents often contribute to children's problems and seldom to their solution, and teachers are as likely to add to children's problems as to diminish them. (A list of books that provide examples of ways that 10- to 16-year-old children cope is appended.) (FL)