Question: I need any advice on how to create a connection with my 16 year old son. I left him and his mother when he was just a baby. I was an alcoholic and actually she kicked me out, not that I made any effort to stay or to stay involved in his life. I sent birthday gifts but I missed some years. I have more than 2 years of non stop sobriety behind me now. Long story short my exwife wants my son to get to know me. She is really a wonderful and forgiving person and she wants us to have a relationship. I want it also. We went out to the park with her and it was OK and we even all laughing and joking but then I took him out for dinner alone the next weekend and it was so awkward and uncomfortable for both of us. He would not say anything but yes or no and I don’t know what to do. He obviously does not want to do this so should I force things?

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

While there could be more going on in your particular situation where it would be helpful to have someone sit down and help you talk, the situation you describe sounds quite normal and may not really have the conclusions that you have reached. Interacting with teenagers is different. It is tempting to think of them as children, yet they are pushing for more autonomy and self-definition. It is tempting to look at them as adults, but they have not quite developed to that point either.

One of the questions to ask is what type of a relationship are you wanting to establish with your son and what might he be looking for, even if he is not saying it. Just from what you have said, it does not sounds like you are looking to be in a strong parenting role and neither of the other two are looking for that either. I would also suspect that you are not looking to try and foster a "best friend" role. Once you work out what type of a relationship everyone is hoping for (perhaps more akin to a mentor) then you may find it easier to move towards that goal.

When you met with your son and ex-wife, the conversation was moderated by the fact that your ex-wife was a connection between the two of you. When you were on your own, the training wheels were off. Connecting with teens is not an easy task. Every year, high school teachers have to try and bridge that gap and gain the trust of their new students. People of your son's age are more focused on peers than forming relationships with adults. Developmentally, they are more involved in breaking away from parents than forging new relationships with adults. However, teenagers do look for people that have something to offer, especially if they have the choice to take it or not. This is to say that I would not be so certain that he doesn't want to have some type of a relationship with you but that it will take time.

You can't regain the time that has passed. You will not have a strong role as a child's father but you may develop a positive relationship over time and even be able to take on the role of an adult parent. Working at it, allowing things to be awkward at times, you can journey to a place where there will be peace and wholeness.

Question: My 13 year old daughter wants to go on the birth control pill. She talked to my ex wife about this. WTF am I supposed to do about this? Should she get some kind of therapy?

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

There is a lot not represented in this question that could easily change how someone might answer it, so you will have to consider your own situation to make decisions about it. Let me address some of those aspects first.

The first factor is that women (young and older alike) may begin taking birth control pills for a variety of reasons. The most obvious of which is to prevent conception when they are sexually active. Depending on your faith tradition background and your own spirituality, you may find that this is not an option that is acceptable regardless of the age of the woman. There also are cases where young women (and yes, your thirteen year old daughter qualifies, at least physically) desire to begin use of oral contraceptives even when they are not sexually active. This could be because they believe the occasion could come up where they would become sexually intimate with someone and want to be prepared in case this would happen. In some communities, it could be the result of fear of being sexually attacked. Depending on lots of things around this and whether you feel your daughter is being impulsive or has really thought things through, there might be a need to have someone for her to talk these things through with.

However, it is also possible that your daughter's desires have nothing to do with sexual behavior. There are different types of pills that can be used and they have a range of other benefits. These benefits can include things such as reducing menstrual cramps and make the woman's periods lighter as well as preventing certain types of diseases. There are also women who go on the combination pill to help with a variety of other conditions including acne, iron deficiency and some PMS symptoms. Some birth control methods will to limit the number of periods in the month or to eliminate them all together. These motivations are quite different than those in the last paragraph. These, too, could require counseling before she should start using the birth control pill. However, rather than a therapist, her physician should be able to provide this counsel. If it is really affecting her then entering therapy might be appropriate.

Another dimension to the situation that the questioner originally raises is that his daughter spoke about this with his ex-wife. This is an area of life where it is natural for a daughter to speak to her mother rather than her father. Some sensitive topics are difficult for people to talk about with certain parents. However, if you are your ex-wife are not on the same page around parenting issues, then this will add difficulty for your children as they get different messages at different points. If this is drastic, but not volatile, the two of you as parents may benefit from therapy or at least mediation to help you be able to provide more consistency and to have appropriate communication between you. It also raises the question of how involved you are in your daughter's life. This will also affect what role you might have in this situation. Interestingly, research that has come out in the last five years (for example Mendle et al in Child Dev., 2009 Sep-Oct 80(5)) has found that absent or partially absent fathers can affect the mean age at which young women have their first sexual intercourse by lowering the mean by as much as a year. There are lots of factors that go into this.

Looking across all teenagers, not paying attention to factors that tend to earlier or later sexual activity, studies state that half of all teenagers have had first intercourse before the age of seventeen. There is certainly variability in this age based upon the other factors (for example half of black male teenagers in these same studies have had sexual intercourse before fifteen). With these being median figures, there are people who will have had sexual intercourse before these ages, even years before. Some people have said that we should expect this as there is some evidence that puberty is occurring earlier. The average age for puberty among girls/women is generally seen to be eight to fourteen. This raises the question of how this affects the child/young adult to physically have matured and be physically ready for sexual activity but yet to have not matured emotionally and not be ready to have children. This is an issue that can cause tension for someone in that situation, as well as for their parents. In an ideal world, there might be some form of group therapy for these children/young adults and space for their parents to process, but this is not commonly offered. If you were trying to find a way to give your daughter space to talk through these issues in a group, it might be in a normal therapeutic setting but it might also happen in another setting, such as a church or community group.

Your daughter is growing up. This will provide challenges for her as well as for you. If this becomes too much at any stage, then seeking out therapy is appropriate. Talking with each other can also help. If you have instilled good values in her, then she will come through these challenging times. There is hope for a future where she will experience wholeness and peace, as ill you.

Question: My son is 10 and he is very fearful and anxiety prone. He is popular and well liked at school so he hides his fears there but at home he still doesn’t want to go to his room upstairs unless someone will go with him and about 1 night a week he can’t sleep because he lays awake with worries that he has trouble articulating. They just seem to be this vague sense of unease. He is doing well in school and he is generally a happy child, other than this anxiety and fear he deals with. I have been reluctant to take him to a psychologist because I think that once I do he will no-doubt come away with a label and then he will be labeled as having some type of mental illness. Do you think that it is urgent, given his age and the fact that he is generally happy, that we tackle this now. Can you recommend a book or give some advice on how I can help overcome his worrying? He is very intelligent and he is looking for me to tell him how to not worry and I feel like I am failing him that I can’t.

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

It is difiuclt to be able to advise in your specific case, particularly as there are certain questions that are left open in what you describe. As such, I can only answer aout similar types of cases and encourage you to explore your particulars with someone in your are.

At the beginning of your account, you give some details about your son's behavior at school. The connection between being popular and well liked at his age and not having fears is not necessarily so clear. It is also not clear from what you described what fears your son would be hiding when at school. Even at home, it appears that his fears are very specific and do not overwhelm his whole expereince of life.

It would be interesting to know about things that happened before or around the time that he started having these problems. It is not clear whether he is experiencing general worries that are most prominent when he tries to go to sleep, whether he is afraid of his bedroom or something in it or whether his fears are more connected with sleeping. Of course, there are ways of working this out, but the question as posed is pretty hard to determine which would in fact be the case. Each of these could have very different root causes and would then want to be looked at differently. For example, if it is general anxiety being aplified at nighttime, which could be normal for a pre-adolescent who may be facing changes in his environment as he ages, then there are techniques that could be used to ease these anxieties. Also, if it is general anxiety and other techniques don't work, there are other alternatives that a mental health team could utilize, although they would not be the first line of attack for someone his age. On the other hand, if it is his room that is the source and for example this came from a movie that he watched, there are ways to talk through the differences between the movie an reality and to help him beyond fears of things that are not likely. As a final example, if it is about sleeping there are a number of things that could be behind this and one of them might be a fear of dying, especially if euphanisms about sleeping were used to describe someone he knew that died.

You may need to use a mental health professional to help you get to the bottom of this if he is not able to express his fears and anxieties to you. The mental health professional does not have to be a psychologist but could also be a masters level clincian (social worker, mental health counselor, marriage and family therapist, etc) or even a school counselor. Unless being done through school, you would likely be using your insurance or your employee assistance program to help pay for the sessions. If you do this, the mental health professional will have to provide a diagnosis. However, insurance companies and the whole system do not require this diagnosis to be something that is a life-long serious mental illness. There are diagnoses (such as adjustment disorder with anxiety or bereavement) which are by their nature not necessarily expected to be life-long. In any case, stigma around mental illness is decreasing in our society and many family and consumer groups would state that it is better to be labelled and getting help for what is going on than to not be labelled and to continue to suffer. In the case of anxiety disorders, a 2005 study (Kessler RC, Berglund P, Demler O, Jin R, Merikangas KR, Walters EE (June 2005). "Lifetime prevalence and age-of-onset distributions of DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication". Arch. Gen. Psychiatry 62 (6): 593–602. ) found that 29% of people in the UNited States suffer from an anxiety disorder at some point in their life , with 11-18% adults having a current anxiety disorder in a given year. If your son was diagnosed, he would be fitting along with about a third fo the population and there is hope that he could erturn to a place of peace and wholeness in his life.

As you seek to discern what to do in this situation, I wish you well. As you take time to think, I would encourage you to decide on a course of action sooner rather than later. Losing a night of sleep each week will have a toll on your son's physical and mental health and could end up having an impact on other parts of his life including school and social circles that are currently working well. It is also possible that an untreated anxiety disorder (if that is what he has) could draw out other related disorders. At the minimum, I would try to involve his school counselor in what is going on. If you are particularly concerned about possible labels still, you could seek help through your work's employee assistance program (as these programs are short term and thus more likely to utilize situational diagnoses unless a referral for further treatment was needed) or a professional in private practice that you can afford to go to on a cash basis and thus not generate any diagnosis trail. This is not soemthing that I would be really concerned about but you have to judge your own comfort level.

Question: My 14 year old son is not interested in extracurricular or community activities. He is shy and he would rather be at home playing on his computer. I know he does not enjoy these things but I think they are important so I try to force him to participate, which causes endless battling at home. Should I give up on this battle or is it worth persevering with?

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

Parents (such as probably the one who intially raised this question) who were very socially involved often have difficulty understanding their children who are introverted, especially if they are also not highly involved with other people. There can be a difference between shyness and truly drawing your strength from yourself (as is the case for an introvert). If the roles were reversed, the extroverted parent would be frustrated and angry if they were being made to stay at home and away from the social settings that act to recharge them.

Before deciding what to do, the first thing to look at is why the child is engaging in the activities that they are. Does the child truly enjoy and feel drawn to the current activities? Is the child using the current activities to avoid alternate activities? If that is so, is it because there is no real interest or aptitude for those activities or is it operating out of fear or other negative emotional reasons that may not truly play out? Understanding this will help you as a parent to decide whether or not this is something that you should consider trying to influence, encourage or support your child to do differently.

Even if the earlier questions make you want to work with your child, there is still another important thing to think about. How important is participating in the alternate activities? In answering this question it is important to look at it from the present time frame and from the perspective of your child's life. It is very important to not simply move forward because you think that these activities are important based on your experience and personality. This will help to understand whether engaging the alternative activities is significant enough to make a fight or battle worthwhile.

Using these basic areas of thinking, you should be able to work out whether you want to continue the battles around this area or whether you should back off and not strongly engage in this issue. It should also make it less of a battle if this is something that you are wanting to continue as you will have a better understanding of how it i important from your child's perspective. Whichever way your own situation ends up deciding, there is the possibility of finding wholeness and peace as you move forward.

Question: My daughter is 12. She has had a complex history of illness (too much to get into and it doesn’t matter anyway for this) which has left her now dealing with chronic pain. Last year she was heavily medicated but it left her sedated all the time. She just couldn’t function like a kid at all. So we decided that even though she was going to have more pain issues we had to get her off the morphine. Since the beginning of October she has been totally opiate free. So now she is dealing with a lot of pain and when it gets particularly bad she reacts by lashing out, especially at family members. She is a middle of three sisters and she will physically hit and pinch her sisters when she feels bad. They understand but they are also getting very tired of this. She is getting older. So far she has not had any problems at school (she comes home from school when she starts feeling pain) but we are at the end of our rope as a family. We can’t go on like this. We can’t let her hurt our other kids. We can’t put her under the medications again. Our doctor suggested counseling but she won’t go (she hates it) and when we forced her she just barely communicated in sessions so it did no good. There is no answer. What can we do?

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

As a parent we want to look at our children and see things going well. Parents do not want to see their child in pain. Parents do not want to see their child not being able to function. Parents do not want to see their child acting out. When a number of ways have already been pursued to address these issues, it can be hard to really think about what is going on and how to address it.

Let's think about the specifics of the case raised as an example of the struggle that a parent may need to address. The first step to finding peace and wholeness is to look carefully at what is making your daughter "lash out". There are actually a number of possibilities and each of them would go along with a different answer.

There is little background about how this parent got their child off of medications for her pain. While she was prescribed the medication for her pain, she could still have been addicted. There are different ways of dealing with this withdrawal, however, regardless, after six months there remains the possibility of cravings. If your daughter has not learned how to handle those cravings, cravings can also make someone irritable which could be the root behind her lashing out. If she did not get help while going through the acute phase of the withdrawal, finding a way for her to learn about dealing with cravings would be a helpful thing to do not only for the current situation but also for the future.

Another possible contributor to her lashing out is normal sibling rivalry. You expressed that she does not have problems at school but also that she comes home before the pain becomes too intense - does she have problems with her friends at other times? Depending on many factors (age differences, relationships, rooming relationships, etc) it is not uncommon for someone at her age to have problems with her siblings. If this is the case, there are a number of interventions that can help. These range from time and maturity (which you may not want to wait out), parenting strategies (with appropriate boundaries and oversight of interactions), strategies for the siblings (who may not currently be equipped to handle the relationship, especially if they are affected by the fact that she has serious medical issues), to family therapy (that she might be more open to as the whole family would be participating).

Then, of course, there is the possibility that the major contributor is the pain that your daughter is in. This could be directly in terms of how she reacts when she is under a lot of pain or it could be because of how she feels dealing with chronic pain. While counseling would be a good way to help her in coping and in responding differently, this has not worked so far. You may want to try a different therapist as part of the problem may have been the relationship with the particular therapist (I know I am not the right therapist for everyone). You could also look to see if there are any appropriate group therapy sessions in your area - she may find it easier to relate in a group of people with similar problems or a group of people about her age. The other area to work on would be alternative ways of managing her pain. Medication is one avenue for this and you have chosen to leave that behind because it was not working for other reasons. There are still other ways to help address the pain which will vary depending on the type of pain your daughter has but may include things like meditation, yoga and medications to address other contributing symptoms (like anti-depressants).

Of course, in many cases, the cause is not one of these, but is actually a combination of more than one of these and possibly other factors as well. You will be able to use a blend of things to address the situation. There are still things that you can do and it is possible to find an answer. By continuing to work with the professionals you have helping you, you and your daughter can be on the journey to peace and wholeness.

Question: I was frustrated with my 11 year old daughter and I was just in a bad mood and at the end of my rope. She is a little heavy but she is healthy and active. She was pestering me to sleep over at her friend’s house and I had already said no and then I said something like all you’ll end up doing is eating chips and drinking coke all night and getting even fatter than you are already. I don’t have a clue why I said it but she burst into tears and ran to her room. I apologized but I don’t think I undid the damage. The last thing I want to do is make her feel self conscious about her weight. How do I undo the damage I did? I am the worst dad in America.

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

Good parents want what is best for their children. However, even good parents say and do things that are not the best. It is impossible to always say just the right thing and do the right thing, particularly as your child becomes an adolescent and as they move on to become a young adult. So the first response to a father who is dealing with a situation like this is to acknowledge your humanness. While what was said is not the best thing to have said and it is clear that your reaction came about from your emotions rather than from carefully thinking out how best to respond, this is far different than being the worst dad in America. Unfortunately, there are men in our country who show no love or affection towards their children; there are men who continually put down their child and have nothing that offset that; there are men who are not involved in their children's lives; there are men who...; the list goes on.

Your humanity and how you deal with it can be a positive force for your daughter. Even if your daughter has accepted your apology (which is not clear from the question), you can still sit down with her and talk about how your mood and frustration took the better of you and the types of things you plan to do to help improve for the future. Of course, before the talk you will need to think about the strategies you could have used that would have led to a different response. Talk to her about strategies such as creating space from a stressor so that you can be in control rather than allowing your emotions to control you, or calling upon resources from within your spirituality, or talking with the other person about how their "pestering" is actually making the answer firmer rather than changing it, or other techniques that you find helpful. In fact, you can even invite her to suggest other things you could have done that would have helped in the situation.

You describe your daughter as being "a little heavy" and this could mean anything from a couple of pounds over her ideal weight to the low range of obese. Obesity has become more of an issue for children in the United States. Is there obesity in your daughter's family? Being open about why you have concerns can be helpful. At the same time, acknowledging the positives of your daughter's health and activity is also important. As you discuss these things with your daughter it is important to make sure the tone of the conversation is one that conveys your love, care and concern for her. This was not present when you were frustrated. You can also help her with making choices that are better for her health. Have her have her friend over for a sleep over that you have planned together that has better choices being made. Be sensitive that she is already aware of her own situation and work to be in better partnership with her.

So, while you may want to address the issue of your daughter's weight at some point, the more important thing is to look at how you (and her) respond when under stress. Let her know you are not perfect and invite her into the solution for the future. As a parent, you are allowed to be human and as a human you will make mistakes. Because you make mistakes does not make you the worst parent in the world, but it does provide you the opportunity to grow and to help your child to grow.

Question: My daughter is 14 one of her friend’s got pregnant this year. Another of her friends was arrested for shoplifting before Christmas. They both seemed like good responsible kids to me. If the kids in her group are obviously up to no good should I try to influence my daughter so she does not spend as much time with them? As far as I know she has done nothing seriously wrong but I am worried that she is going to get tagged as a ‘bad apple’ just by association. My daughter has been very open and upfront and has told me everything that is going on (I think) so on the other hand I do not want to ‘reward’ her honesty with something she would consider a punishment.

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

Parents of adolescents are often concerned not only with their child's behaviors but also the behaviors of the friends of their child. The questioner is raising some for these very concerns. When the situation is not as open as this parent seems to believe things are, things are more difficult because the parent will be involved in a lot of second guessing. This type of situation raises several key parenting issues.

The biggest parenting issue is the parent's perspective on protecting their child. There are situations where it is appropriate for a parent to try and shield their child from the negatives in their society, especially if there is grave danger for an adolescent who interacted with that society (as might be seen in areas of high gang activity). Some parents will operate from the opposite end of the spectrum and allow their adolescent to be involved in whatever they want. Most parents operate somewhere in between these two extremes. On this middle ground, the parent will allow the adolescent to experience the reality of the world while protecting the adolescent from the fullness of the danger that they might be facing. From this perspective, each of the incidents that the adolescent experiences becomes a potential teaching situation. When the adolescent shares with the parent that a friend has become pregnant, there is a natural opening to be able to talk about a range of topics: sex, love, relationships, safe sex, responsible relationships, etc. When another friend is arrested for shoplifting, the conversation may be more focused on thinking through your actions to possible consequences, materialism, being satisfied with what you can afford and even thrill seeking. This can be hard for a parent to do but if done will allow the adolescent to deal with developmental tasks and be guided in mature decisions.

Another dimension of parenting is trying to protect you child or adolescent. IN so doing, a parent is constantly evaluating the people that are in their child's life. It is not uncommon for parents to miss some of the signs in their adolescent's life or in the life of their friends. Some things endure the test of time while other things are very particular for the present generation. It is important to remember that adolescents make mistakes and to be careful about judging the adolescent by the consequences of an isolated mistake. For example, an adolescent that is usually very responsible sexually (however you want to define that) may have a single instance of unprotected sex which results in either pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. This single mistake does not mean that the adolescent is a bad person, although there will be consequences that have to be faced. This makes it harder to determine whether a particular group of adolescents are up to no good or not. Judging this is important in determining how to respond.

When your child becomes an adult, they will face situations that include other people doing things that they should not be doing. If your adolescent is able to experience some of that now and not follow their example, this lays a strong foundation for their adult life. In fact, how is your adolescent in terms of helping others who have gone the wrong way to address the situations they find themselves in? how do they still maintain a supportive friendship to the other person without condoning the negative behavior? These are important lessons that they can learn. There is the possibility that they will be seen as guilty by association by some people, but is your adolescent doing the right thing and is your adolescent making good choices? There will be people that will see this. Of course, there will be situations that are serious enough that you will want your adolescent to sever ties so that the guilt by association does not occur.

Finally, fostering an open relationship with your adolescent is really important. In a case where you are simply trying to protect your child, it is very important to allow your adolescent the space that they need to be able to share with you. It is also important to have a certain level of trust between you, a trust that is based on the pattern of your relationship and not on what you think might be possibly going on without any real basis for this fear.

Parenting an adolescent is not an easy task. Being the adolescent in that relationship is also not easy. However, if you remember that your child needs to develop the skills they will need in adulthood and that you may need to be on the lookout for more serious problems that can arise, you will be able to find a balance in your response. AS you do, gauge the roles that your adolescent's peers play in your adolescent's life. Doing this on your own, or with the help of a qualified family therapist, will help you and your adolescent on your paths to wholeness and peace.

Question: How many hours a day should a 9 year old be allowed to use a computer and tablet and ps3 and watch TV etc. all combined? I had heard that the recommended limit was 2 hours per day and that if you were watching TV while looking at a tablet for 1 hour that counted as 2 hours. I am embarrassed to say that my kid spends a lot more than 1 hour a day watching TV and looking at her laptop. Is this old limit outdated or unrealistic? I don’t know anyone whose kids would only spend an hour a day of ‘screen time’ and everyone is always looking at the computer while they watch TV these days. What’s a sensible limit for a 9 year old today?

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

There is no magical number of the maximum amount of time a day that a child should be connected to technology devices. It is true that the recommendation used to be 2 hours daily (at least during the week) but individual circumstances should influence what you are considering.

The first aspect to consider is why the child is using the technology. A growing trend in education are laptop or tablet programs. In these programs every child is given a laptop or tablet to use in connection to their education. In some cases, school districts have eliminated traditional textbooks and gone to using electronic textbooks on these devices. In some cases, teachers may even assign playing games on the device as part of the homework. If this is the case, some 9 year olds may find that their entire 2 hour limit (daily or even just at home) is eliminated simply through use fro education.

This brings up the more important ways to judge your child's use of technology - what are they not engaging in. One of the ideas behind the old two hour rule was that this would then leave time for other activities that are important for a child to engage in. What is it that you want to see your child doing as they develop in a healthy fashion? For many people this list will include things such as physical exercise, activities engaging the imagination, hobbies, face to face social interactions, learning work habits through chores and exploring the world around them. If your child is able to continue to engage in these types of activities and has time for their use of technology, then the amount of time they are spending on their technology use is not interfering with what you believe to be important tasks in their daily (or regular) life.

A final aspect that is raised in this question is the aspect of engaging in multiple tasks at the same time (e.g. watching TV while being on a laptop). Some people will value this in the learning of how to multi-task. Others will argue that we are not really effective when we multi-task. You may want to watch how your child is spending time on multiple activities. Is your child really just having the TV on in order to create noise and distraction and if so how does this relate to their laptop use? Is your child merely using the laptop during the commercials (or shows) in order to get some things done during this "down time" in watching TV? If so, are they choosing activities that are appropriate to do in short periods of time? What this really does is opens up the opportunity to have a conversation with your child about what they are doing. This can be good in your relationship and help both of you really understand what is going on and if it is really a positive use of the time. In so doing, you might want to also look at what you do and what you are modeling. Often as adults we engage in many of these same patterns without really thinking about it.

So, in summary, there is not a magic rule about how much technology use your child should be doing in a given day. IN assessing this, you need to look at the actual use, how the use is affecting other dimensions of the child's life and whether the way they are using technology is really productive. In assessing this for your child (and yourself), appropriate limits can be determined that will allow you and your child to experience wholeness and peace in relationship to the role of technology in their life.

Question: My 14 year old daughter has no friends. She has a great heart but she is shy and she is a bit of a late bloomer. I try to encourage her to join clubs and after school activities but she does not want to. She is obviously lonely. I try to spend a lot of time with her but she does not open up to me about what is going on at school. It breaks my heart to see her in pain. I wish I knew how to help her? Please give me some advice!

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

There are several levels of concerns that this question points to. The first layer is how parents perceive what is going on in their children's life. Then there is the perspective of loneliness (which is actually much larger than an adolescent issue). Finally, there is the question of how to help a child become engaged and involved. These three layers can be addressed in general, but specific answers for the questioner's situation would require more understanding of the whole situation and it may benefit from the involvement of a counselor.

In general, parent want what is best for their children. They want their children to be happy and successful wit smooth transitions through the various stages of life. The easist way to look at their child's life is through the lens of their own life. It is easy to see positive things in our child's life when it parallels the positive we experienced in our own life and it is easy to want to avoid the thing that were negative experiences in our own life. It is much harder to see what is going on through the lens of our child's eyes. To do this requires putting on the other person's glasses and seeing the world through them. This can result in our projecting our own perspective on things onto our child. This is not necessarily the case for the person who posed thi question, but there are some signs that point to this possibility, namely, if you read the question carefully everything that is labeled as negative is done so based on the determination of the parent and not because that is the way it has been described by the child (who in this case is an adolescent).

My best guess is that this parent is an extrovert and that their adolescent is an introvert. Let me be clear about these terms. An extrovert is one who is energized and recharges by being around other people. On the other hand, and introvert is energized and recharged from within themselves (even if they engage well with other people). These are preferences within our personality and generally remain fairly stable throughout our life. In this sense, it is possible for the child to be aone and not lonely. Earlier in life, the younger child may have been very engaged with imaginary friends and may now enjoy activities that are more solitary. While these are our preferences (and this will affect how satisfied we are with situations), it can also be good to explore the other side. An introvert can enjoy being with and doing things with groups of people (so long as they can recharge through soem personal time) and extroverts can come to enjoy quiet time on their own (so long as they can recharge through some social involvement). Having an understanding of whehter your child is just prefering to do activities alone or is lonely can be difficult, especially if the parent is an extrovert.

Having said that, how can we help our adolesent engage if that turns out to be an appropriate thing to do. If your child is more of an introvert, the idea of joining clubs and activities may not be particularly attractive. After all, it is going against the prefered personality style. On the other hand, with careful understanding, appropriate motivations are possible. For example, whn an adolescent has a "great heart", what are they particularly passionate about. What ways are there to get the adolescent involved in activities with other people that connect around the area of passion. If they are passionate about poverty, are there avenues to be involved in a soup kitchen? If they are passionate about animal, is there a group looking to protect strayanimals? Some of these may be connected to the school but some solutions may be in more creative places.

Finally, know that parents are not perfect in going through these situations. Another thing to realize is that given the developmental tasks of an adolescent, it is not uncommon that the adolescent will chose to talk with and confide in other adults who are not their parents. This is a normal part of the process of maturing. As you exam yourself nd look at your adolescent's life, it is possible for both of you to find wholeness and peace.

Question: my son is doing marijuana and xanax but does not want to go to rehab is there anything i can do to help he is 15 and says he started with marijuana in Jan 2012 and has taken xanax 4 times {4 pills last night} he buys the pills from some man that lives close y should i report this man?

Rev. Christopher Smith Says...:

Please read my reply a couple (question dated November 1) to a similar question that was posed.

When your child, like that of the person who asked this question, is a minor, you have an obligation to be looking out for your child's best interest and health. The difficulty around addictions is that an individual's motivation for treatment is an important contributer to the success of that treatment. When raising the issue of rehab with a teenager, it may be better to not make it a yes/no question about going to rehab, but rather to raise that they need to stop using the substances and to come up with them with a numberof solutions to move to this goal and allow them some say in what they will try to do. More could be said about this, but the question being posed is more focused on what to do about one of the suppliers that a teenager uses.

The first thing to be clear about is that if you report the person you know your child is getting illegal drugs from then the autorities may or may not get that person away from your child. Even if they do get that person away from you child, in most locations in this country, that person will simply be replaced with another person or your child will turn to an alternative supplier that they can also find out about. There are few places in this country where the removal of a single street level dealer will dry up the supply in an area. That being said, providing this information to the authorities may be helpful in their broader attempts to address the illegal drug business in your community. As such, I would not argue against doing so. It is also possible that your child could become a suspect themself if the police chose to monitor this person before taking action. This could be something to talk about with your child.

Marijana and prescription pills can both be addicting. However, limiting the supply of one does not necessarily address the addiction to the other. I cannot say if a particular person is yet addicted but the esculation of drug use is something that a parent also needs to be particularly aware of and needs to understand that when a person goes from a single drug of misuse to multiple drugs, this is a significant step.