Teen Drug Addiction - It CAN Happen to Your Family!

Parents, Pay Attention to this Book!

The biggest parenting fallacy in the world lies in thinking that we can somehow protect our children by living in nice houses, in nice neighborhoods, in quiet little towns: by thinking the walls of our houses will protect our children from making big decisions! They won’t! Our children will make ALL of the big decisions in their lives. I simply cannot say it any more forcefully! If you have not yet realized that the decision about using drugs poses a threat to every single child, wake up!

Over the past 10 years as I have taught parents HOW to teach their children to make good decisions via my Parenting with Dignity curriculum, I have told these parents the one thing I know to be the absolute truth: “Your children will make all the big decisions in their lives, not some, all. When they make the decision about whether they will use cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamines, alcohol, or any other drug, you will not be present and therefore you will be unable to protect them. The person offering the drug will make sure you are not there!”

If you need a wake up call, and most American parents do, please read Christy Crandell's book titled, "Lost and Found". It will open your eyes about what can happen to you if you do not teach your children to make good decisions.

What our children will use to make those decisions will hopefully be what we have taught them. However, our failure to teach them how to make those decisions does not mean they will not make them! It just means that they will use ideas someone else has taught them about using illegal substances! And believe me, what some of the other people will teach them, is not what you want them using to make that life or death decision.

I wish that I could get every parent to read this book. My wish is that every parent would read "Lost and Found" at the time their first child is born! Then, maybe they could see, first hand, how the tragedy of drug addiction can strike any child who is not completely and totally well prepared with good decision making skills. Christy's book is proof positive that parents cannot protect their children with what the parents know. It is only what your kids know and use that can protect them!

Parents Must TEACH Children HOW to Make Good Decisions!

Living in a home with loving parents who have strong morals and ethics is not the same as teaching a child how to use those ideas to make good decisions! As I tell parents over and over, “Talking is not teaching. Telling is not teaching. What you are doing does not become teaching until you see change as a result.”

A Wake Up Call!

This book should serve as a wake up call to every parent who is raising a child. Most of life’s good decisions are made in our heads BEFORE we are in the situation. Our children are no different and they cannot be allowed to wait until they are in a situation like this family, before they are taught how to make good decisions for themselves based upon sound morals, values, ethics, and principles.

Hopefully this book will help parents realize that, without proper awareness and a sound plan for teaching their children, drug addiction, and the pain and misery associated with it, is a very real possibility for their children and their family.

Please read this book and learn from the heartache and pain this family experienced.

Then, please share the book with every parent you know so that they can be aware of what may be waiting for them if they do not act now to teach their children how to make big decisions.

The Old Ways Are Not Necessarily Wrong… There May Just Be A Better Way!

"Back when I was a kid..."

As we look at parenting techniques, it is important to never rely on the phrase, “When I was a kid, my parents would have…” Simply because something was done to you as a child is no reason to do that same thing to your children! Please do not think that I am saying that everything that our parents did with us was wrong. On the contrary, most of what our parents did with us was probably the best that they could do with what they knew at the time!

The point is that there might just be a BETTER WAY to approach some of these issues. In making this point I often like to help parents to realize that the challenges of raising children in our generation are not necessarily worse than they used to be… they may just be different. Too many parents have bought the idea that “there has never been a tougher time to raise children.” I disagree! However I do believe that this era presents its’ own new, unique, and difficult challenges.

Our family has, in our possession, a diary of our great, great, great, grandparents crossing the plains in a covered wagon. In the handwritten entry made on about the eighth or ninth day of the long trek across the western half of North America, they wrote of burying an eight-year-old daughter who died during the night, and then traveling eight or nine more miles that same day. I have to believe that was a rather difficult time to raise children too. The lessons needed to simply preserve life and the challenges of living were so different back then, that the parenting practices of that era would probably would not be particularly valuable if transferred from that generation to ours. Many of the skills those parents needed to teach to their kids as the family crossed to plains in their covered wagon would be most likely be worthless lessons for the children of today.

Conversely, the skills we need to teach our children today about drug-free living, and Internet safety would have been worthless to my ancestors as they were crossing the plains!

Now, I am in agreement that the lessons of honesty and integrity would be relevant to each generation of youngsters but even those wonderful lessons might require a different method of teaching.

Question Techniques

If we are willing to admit that some lessons might not apply to our children today, does it not stand to reason or just seem logical for parents to question some of the techniques parents used to use teach children as well? If we need to teach different skills could it not be possible that we need to teach some of those skills using some new and different techniques.

A Great Lesson

Also, there is a great lesson all parents need to learn no matter what age of their children or what the current parenting challenges may be. That valuable lessons it that “it is insanity to keep doing the same thing and expect a different result!”

The other day I was called by a distraught mother who was upset because her 6-year-old son was so unruly and wild in grocery stores and shopping malls. Her statement to me was, “I try to be consistent with him and I spank him every time he misbehaves! I just don’t know what to do. It is just not working!”

When I suggested to her that she practice the desired behavior at home before going on a shopping trip she said that might take too much time. I also suggested that she explain the rules to her son. Tell him that if he uses the practiced behavior then they will complete their shopping trip, but if he varies from the practiced behavior they will leave and go home.

To this the mother then said to me, “Well, if we just go home, won’t I be punishing myself? Why isn’t the spanking sufficient?” She actually was suggesting that she some how wanted to do exactly the same thing that had not worked for six years and she wanted me to tell how she could do that and expect it to work!

Try It! Who Knows, It Might Work!

When some one gives you a suggestion for a change in your parenting technique, do not insist on doing it the “Old Way”! If the new way is not a violation of your personal values and ethics, give it a try. You will never know if the new technique will work until you try it.

Usually the moment when parents actually start to see that the techniques taught in the Parenting with Dignity course is when they actually try them. When they actually go home and complete the assignment is when they see that there are some new ways of doing things the actually do work!

What Do You Know, a New Technique Worked!

By the way, that lady called back three days later just raving about how simple it was to practice for a little bit before going to the store! She said she could not believe how simple that was to do.

Starting a Parenting with Dignity Class

(Another in Series of Letters from Concerned Parents (If you would like to submit a question for Mac to answer, please feel free to post your question at the bottom of the page!)

Why Would We Want to Start a PWD Class?

Dear Mac,

My wife and I recently purchased a set of the Parenting with Dignity, DVD curriculum and we love it. (We really loved the fact that we received a book for free with the order! the book really helps to refer to after watching he video.) The techniques are working with amazing success. We cannot believe the change in the climate in our family, and both of us feel so much calmer since we are actually approaching our three kids with a real plan. We are about halfway through the Assignment sheets and have just finished with Segment 5.

Our question for you is regarding the starting of a class. We love the curriculum but on your website you are continually trying to get parents to get together and watch the sessions as a group or class with other parents and we are not sure that we see that added value in going through the curriculum with other parents. Why should we put forth the effort to meet with others since the curriculum is working so well for us?

Sincerely,
Father and Mother from West Virginia

A Simple Answer to A Common Question

Dear Father and Mother,

Your question is very perceptive and it is one that I receive almost weekly, so I will answer your question (and the questions of others) regarding the value of holding Parenting with Dignity classes!

It is really quite simple when you think about it; from the day your kids enter school at the common age of five they will spend more waking hours with the kids of other families than they spend with you! Those kids from other families are going to exert a very real and powerful force in the lives of your kids (this is commonly called "peer pressure"). You don’t say how old your kids are but if you have three it is probably pretty safe to assume that at least one of your kids is already of school age and maybe all of them are already in school.

Just like it says in our curriculum, “The ideas in the heads of you kids will rule their world! And it does not matter where those ideas come from”. In the American culture many of the ideas in kids heads come from the kids that they spend time with at school! If you are NOT willing to engage in discussions with the families of those kids and insist on doing “your own thing in your own home” with little or no interaction with the families of the kids that your kids go to school with and play with, then you are committing a fatal error. Those other kids and families will exert lots of pressure on you kids with some pretty dysfunctional ideas; and if you are unwilling to interact you must accept what you get! But peer pressure need not be a negative force!

This Will Sound Familiar!

It works like this: It is so much easier for you to teach something as simple as saying “please” and “thank-you” at your dinner table if, when your kids visit another family home and your kid says, “Hey gimme a biscuit,” and then someone at that table asks them to use “Please!” All of a sudden you are not so weird for demanding the same in your home.

Roll the camera ahead a few years and your daughter or son is on a date to the Prom. It is so much easier for your kid to practice appropriate dating behavior if the kid he or she is dating is practicing the same behavior!
It is so much more reasonable to expect your kid to say “no” to drugs if he or she has friends who are cool, and who are also saying “no” surrounding them! It is much easier to place productive and healthy ideas in your kids’ heads if the kids that they go to school with and hang out with have similar ideas in their heads!

“How do we get there?” you ask. Well it is really pretty simple; you have to get together with the parents of the kids that your kids play with, and go to school with. You need to sit down with the other parents and look each other in the eye and agree on some similar techniques and ideas.

At this point so many parents say, “But we will never agree with other parents on everything!” Granted, but, you know, I have now been in communities in every one of the fifty states, and let me tell you it is not nearly as hard as it may appear at first glance!

Not So Difficult to Find Agreement

If you put twenty adults in a room and ask them to form a list of the twenty biggest problems that they anticipate that their kids will face before they are twenty-one, almost every group will come up with the same list!

The key is to anticipate what your kids will face and to give them the guidance BEFORE they are in the situation. If a whole group of parents have agreed that they want their kids to know what to do in the event that drugs are offered, then they must develop those positive expectations in the heads of their kids! This works so much better if those same actions are in the heads of many of your kids friends and classmates!

A Stimulant for Discussion

Our classes are a great medium for stimulating those discussions in a very non-threatening way! If you will hold the classes with twelve other families then you will have twelve allies in placing productive and positive ideas in your kids heads!

I cannot encourage you strongly enough to set up a class with Parenting with Dignity solely for the purpose of engaging with other parents in building strategies for collectively creating the community to raise your kids. Believe me it works! (And the review of the curriculum will not hurt you either!)

In closing let me offer just one more side benefit to holding classes… you will learn more from the other people in the class than you learn from the curriculum! It is true. You will learn more from the ideas and experiences that the other parents bring to class than you will learn from the curriculum itself. The other families will bring in examples and situations typical to your community and your local culture!

Good luck and if you need help setting up your class just go to http://www.parentingwithdignity.com/PWD/video_series/tape10f.htm and print that page. It is a compilation of things we have learned about setting up successful classes.

Go for it and let me know if I can be of help in setting up your class.

Sincerely,

Mac Bledsoe

Creating “Positive Peer Pressure”

Questions and Answers Are Only part of the Picture

I wish to thank those of you who submit questions to this column. Not only do you personally receive an answer to your own questions, but by asking your question, you also allow others to benefit because you may have just asked a question that helps many others as well. Many families can benefit from the question asked by one parent! However, I would like to point out that these questions and answers in this column represent only a small part of the value that the Parenting with Dignity Program has to offer to you and your family! Just think how wonderful it would be to be involved in the same process with weekly discussions about similar issues with other parents in your community !

Build a Strong Community to Raise Your Children

I cannot recommend strongly enough that you order a copy of the Parenting with Dignity Video Curriculum and/or a copy of either of my books, Parenting with Dignity or Parenting with Dignity the Early Years! By writing questions, many readers of this column can, and do, receive specific help with individual problems , however, this process may be of fleeting value because that small bit of advice may not help out the next time that another different problem arises! This process of question and answer keeps throwing parents back into the same loop... ask, answer; ask, answer; ask answer; and so on.

Develop a Complete Plan for raising Your Children

What the Parenting with Dignity Course does is to outline a complete plan for raising children in a highly effective and dignified manner. The program teaches you to be your own source of answers! My books do the same thing. In my books, I outline a complete plan for raising self-directed and fulfilled, happy children who are fully capable of making great decisions for themselves based upon a strong and complete foundation of values, morals, and ethics that you have taught to them! The video curriculum and the books teach you to create your own strategies tailored to your own family and your own problems.

Obviously, I will continue to offer specific advice via this column because it fills a need for so many parents and so many families. Even parents who have completed the course find this type of forum to be helpful. However, the point that I am attempting to make here is that in spite of receiving valuable help from these regular articles, the most broad and lasting value that you can receive from Parenting with Dignity lies in allowing yourself to go through the entire course with other parents. Going through each lesson and doing all of the assignments in conjunction with other families will bring the most value to your family!

Get the Maximum Value from Parenting with Dignity

The maximum value that families can receive from Parenting with Dignity comes from not just going through the class; the greatest value comes from forming a class and going through the curriculum with other parents in the neighborhood or community! When families go through the complete course together, they all benefit much more than they would by just going through the curriculum on their own.

Benefit from the Experiences of Others!

Just like in this column, many others may benefit from the question submitted by one parent. Most people tell us that they benefit as much from the discussions with other parents in their classes as they do from the curriculum itself!

A Very Simple Concept

But even more than benefiting from the questions of others, there is an even greater benefit that families receive from going through the curriculum together! This is not a difficult concept to understand. Please understand this: It is so much easier to teach your own children something if every other home that they visit is teaching a similar thing! It is so much easier to teach something as simple as saying “please” and “thank-you” at your own dinner table, if every home your child visits is teaching the same thing!

Likewise, it is so much easier to teach your children the advantages of drug-free living if your children are in constant contact with other children who have been taught a similar approach to life! Peer pressure is only negative if it pushes in a negative direction! Positive peer pressure can be a parent's biggest ally! Parenting with Dignity helps you to create this powerful positive force for your children.

Positive Peer Pressure

It is so much more natural to expect your children to behave in a desired manner if their friends are doing so too! Can it be more simple? It is just so much more reasonable to expect your child to behave in an appropriate manner while on a date to the Prom if he/she is dating a young person who has been taught similar dating behavior! Then just imagine that they are on a "double-date" with a couple more young people who have also been taught similar dating behavior; the peer pressure is now pushing them all toward doing the right thing!

Create a Positive Community for Raising Your Children

Put very simply, Parenting with Dignity will help you to build the positive community to raise your children! Parenting with Dignity will create positive peer pressure to "push" your children towards positive decisions and behavior! Please join the many other families who have started a Parenting with Dignity Course in their neighborhood. Order a copy of our DVD Curriculum and start a class today!