A very worthwhile booklet published by the Drug Policy Alliance helps parents evaluate and discuss strategies for protecting their teenagers from drug abuse. Since the original publication of Safety First: A Reality-Based Approach to Teens and Drugs, more than 300,000 copies have been distributed worldwide.
Author Marsha Rosenbaum* is director emerita of the San Francisco office of the Drug Policy Alliance, where she spearheaded DPA’s work on youth and drugs and created the Safety First booklet; it is available (free) online in multiple languages. The following is a selection from the booklet.
Michael Riera has written several excellent books on parenting teenagers, among them: Uncommon Sense for Parents with Teenagers and Staying Connected to Your Teenagers. Several of his concepts have made their way into the public discourse about raising teenagers: Consultant as opposed to Manger; Influence as opposed to Control; Parenting Teens as an Art, and so forth. The following excerpt from the former book touches on a few of these ideas.
The following powerful poem by Khalil Gibran (1922) speaks to the notion of allowing our children to own their own dreams. We must guide and support them, while at the same time allowing them to discover their own ambitions, identity and purpose and to chart their own life paths.
Competitiveness. Hmmmm… Given my particular temperament, I am inclined to feel uncomfortable even when an Olympics athlete “wins” for having completed the race a fraction of a second before another. My inclination, too, would be to view competition as neither helpful nor constructive in promoting happiness and excellence, and to insist that it sidesteps the natural joy of non-measured, non-compared accomplishment. And yet….
In 1909 Rudyard Kipling (1865-1939), English short-story writer, poet and novelist (remembered mostly for his tales and poems of British soldiers in India and for his tales for children) published his now-famous poem “If” in a collection entitled Rewards and Fairies. The poem was not well-received, possibly because of its moralizing tone, its too-neat solution to life’s problems, and its orderly, rhymed verses at a time when Romantic poets were experimenting with freer forms of verse.
The following posting includes selections from Part 2 of psychologist and social sociologist Laurence Steinberg’s