When Nothing is Working

What if nothing seems to be working to encourage your teenager to head in a better direction? Perhaps you’ve applied consequences to correct their inappropriate behavior, and have progressively taken away many or all of their privileges, but they still break your rules and they still defy you.

Having a child who is struggling will wear you out.  The parents who drop off their teenagers at our Heartlight residential counseling program are at wit’s end, tired, and frazzled.  They’ve literally spent every ounce of emotional energy in a struggle that has taken place over many months. It’s not easy for any parent to leave their child in the hands of strangers, but at that point, they are desperate for solutions. >> Article continued…

Why Teens Seek the Wrong Crowd

Does your teenager feel valued and significant in your home?  If not, they’ll look for value and acceptance somewhere else.  There are plenty of people who can make them feel valued, but mostly from the wrong crowd and with the wrong motives.

We parents do a ton of stuff for our kids, but what if they still don’t feel valued?  Should we do even more, or less?  Are we doing the right things, or all the wrong things?  How can we best instill value in our teenagers?  And why is that so important? >> Article continued…

Suicide Epidemic Among Teens

For a teenager to be so unbearably unhappy that he would choose to kill himself is something that is almost too painful for a parent to think about. But with the increasing prevalence of teen suicide, no parent can afford to ignore the possibility. Suicide is now the third leading cause of death for high school students.

Kids look at this world as being more and more hopeless.  And many are choosing suicide as their solution. When I was in high school — a school with 3,000 students — I never knew of any of my peers committing suicide. And even working in Young Life after college, suicide among teens was a very unusual event that we rarely heard of.

Fact is, before the 1960’s, suicide by adolescents happened only rarely; but today, nearly one in ten teens contemplates suicide, and over 500,000 attempt it each year. While suicide rates for all other ages have dropped, suicides among teens have nearly tripled. >> Article continued…

Signs of Drug Use in Teens and Tweens

If you’ve seen an unexplainable or drastic change in your teenager’s honesty, grades, behavior, attentiveness, or friends, it may not be hormones. It could be that they are experimenting with intoxicating substances that are as close as your kitchen drawer, medicine cabinet or garage.

It used to be that older teens were most susceptible to drug experimentation, but kids today are experimenting earlier and earlier.  In fact, 10- to 14- year-olds are now the most likely to begin experimenting with one intoxicating substance or another. >> Article continued…

Pull Out All the Stops to Help Your Teen

For parents, there is no worse feeling than watching your child spin out of control while nothing you do seems to make any difference.  If your teenager’s behavior is giving you feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, and fear, I would like to offer you some suggestions. 

First, stop what you are doing and start a new way of thinking in regard to how you are handling the situation.  Albert Einstein defined insanity as ”Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  If your home is feeling a little “insane” these days, perhaps you need to change how it operates.  >> Article continued…

Is Your Teen Driving You Crazy?

There is much in the news these days about cars accelerating out of control, leaving the driver and passengers helpless to know how to slow down or stop their runaway vehicle.  That’s kind of what it is like in a family with a teenager who is out of control. The whole family gets swept along for the not so joyful ride.

Is your family experiencing a frightening ride with an out of control teenager? Are you at a loss to know what to do, or don’t know how to react when your teen’s behavior makes every wrong turn and is accelerating toward disaster?

Typical adolescent behavior includes moodiness, hyper-sensitivity and irrational thinking — no cause for much alarm.  But there are other behaviors that are warning signs of a bigger problem than you may realize. These attitudes and behaviors are often triggered by a child’s feeling of being disrespected or abandoned in some way at some point in their life, and the level at which those feelings impact their actions, relationships and decisions in the teen years becomes abnormal. >> Article continued…

Intervention and Recovery

Susanna came from a great home, with conservative Christian parents. She grew up attending church with her family, playing sports in a private school and participating in her church youth group. But by the time she was 17, she had become a cynical, street-savvy teenager. Experimenting with drugs and alcohol had spiraled into a dangerous lifestyle that included selling illicit drugs and abusing alcohol.

A photo of Susanna before coming to Heartlight reveals her sitting among stacks of cash from selling drugs, and holding an automatic weapon.  Amazingly, she led this secret life while living at home and under the care of two concerned but unknowing parents. >> Article continued…

A Parent’s Guiding Influence

A parent’s desire to hold on to a child’s innocence in his early years is normal and necessary.  Early childhood is obviously not the right time for them to know certain things. But kids today are exposed to negative influences at earlier and earlier ages, and it is often out of a parent’s control.

Age 16 used to be the benchmark for teens.  It was the age most could begin to drive, and when given a set of car keys, the influence a parent has on how much of the world their teen experiences changes dramatically. But today, a younger teen has the keys to “drive” on over to some of the seediest places on earth, with the click of a mouse button.  The Internet has changed everything. >> Article continued…

When Adopted Children Become Teenagers

Many adopted kids seem to have more than their fair share of issues when they reach the adolescent years. Some can suddenly turn on the very people who rescued them years before, the family who adopted them.  Why is that? 

Here’s why . . . just as self-awareness begins to grow in the early teen years, adopted children can begin to struggle with the who and why of their adoption at this time — even kids who were adopted at birth.  Feelings of abandonment by their birth mother can burst to the surface and add to an already emotionally charged adolescence, fueled by a search for meaning, belonging, and validity in their life.

Many adopted children question their true identity during the teen years. For the mortified adoptive parents, their teenager may demonstrate a profound and shocking lack of appreciation and even a temporary hatred of them. So, the obvious question from these parents is, “What have we done wrong?” My answer to them in most cases is that they have done nothing wrong. >> Article continued…

Teen Recovery from Substance Abuse

More than 80% of youth who have completed a chemical dependency treatment program are unable to maintain sobriety after returning to their home, school, and old peer group. (Source: SAMSHA)

There’s nothing more gut-wrenching for a parent than to deal with their teenager’s drug addiction.  It’s like a slow death, not just for the teen, but for the the entire family.  And it won’t get better without treatment and ongoing support, sometimes spanning the addict’s entire life.   That’s why it’s far better for parents to test for and catch substance abuse early, before it gets a foothold. 

Sadly, more than a million teenagers are admitted every year to drug or alcohol abuse treatment programs.  These adolescents come through a 30-, 60-, or 90-day treatment program, only to find it impossible to maintain their sobriety, because their peers and influences back home haven’t changed.  Without ongoing help, they return to drinking or drugs most of the time. >> Article continued…