Sober fun during summer isn’t as hard to come by as your teen might think. Image courtesy of photostock at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Summer is here. For most parents this is a relief. You’re thankful your teenager is out of school because there is so much less stress when they aren’t doing homework, playing sports, etc. However, for those of you who have a teenager with a history of drinking or drug use, summer is a dreadful time. Every day of the week is a Friday night, and they spend a lot of time unsupervised during the day.
Here are some ideas for sober summer fun that might help your teenager have fun without using substances:
1) Plan a movie night. Let your teenager invite a few friends over to watch movies late into the night. Teens like to do things at night, and usually if they have a plan first they make better choices. You can have snacks ready, and several movies available to choose from.
2) Teens always enjoy a day at the beach. Again, have some planning in place. Make sure you’re driving and another parent is picking up. They’re less likely to use drugs or drink if they know a parent will pick them up. Pack a cooler of food and sodas/juice/water for them and their friends to enjoy.
3) Go for a hike. Even if your teenager doesn’t want you there with them, taking them to a spot where they can hike with a few friends can be a great activity for them to do during summer.
4) Swim in a backyard pool, or a busy neighborhood pool. One place teenagers tend to drink alcohol is at the pool when nobody else is around. In a backyard pool with a parent home it is hard to get away with this. The same goes for a busy community pool.
5) Learn to surf. Any surfer will tell you the best time to surf is very early in the morning. Teens who love to surf might be less likely to party late because they want to get up early the next day. I realize surfers have a reputation for marijuana use, but the act of surfing doesn’t really go well with being high or intoxicated. It takes way too much energy and concentration.
6) Get involved with a high school church youth group. These groups are always planning fun activities during summer from bowling to camping trips. Of course these are always sober outings.
7) Volunteer time. Spending time helping others who are less fortunate is actually fun, and feels rewarding. It also causes teens to think about something other than themselves. When teens are getting high or drinking they tend to be thinking about themselves so volunteering is a great way to break through self-focused thought.
8) Play a sport. I worked with a kid who got high multiple times per day for two years. When he decided to get sober he realized a lot of his friends played basketball each day. He started to play with them and then didn’t want to smoke out anymore because he ran better, reacted faster and played smarter when he was sober.
9) Take a class. There are a lot of interesting, quirky classes offered throughout the community and at the local colleges. Encourage your child to take a class on pottery or dance. They’ll grumble at first but they will most likely end up enjoying honing a new skill.
10) Start exercising. See if your teen can get a friend to work out with on a regular basis. This is really good for self-confidence and stress relief. While your teen might not be extremely stressed over summer, they also might use and drink less if they feel better about themselves.
If you’re the parent of an adolescent and you’re worried about too much summer free-time, hopefully you’ve found this a little bit helpful. It will probably work even better if you let your teenager read through the list and see what they’re willing to do. Sometimes they will say ‘no’ simply because you suggested it.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Belief in God has helped many walk away from addiction. Image Courtesy of Freedigitalphotos.net
Does faith play a role in healing from addiction? Unequivocally, yes. Some people do find ways to get over their addictions without faith, but it seems to be rare. Generally those who quit using have placed their faith in something they believe gives them purpose. Very often, this is God. When life has come to the point where it feels as though there is no point without a high, a sober existence seems boring and unacceptable. It is also usually a miserable process to become sober. This is where faith is very important.
A person needs a reason to get sober. If they can come to believe something bigger than themselves exists, and that thing created them on purpose, sometimes that is reason enough. The addict who is just trying to stop using has to have hope that life will be more meaningful on the other side. This is hard to believe until faith enters the picture. It really helps when the addict comes to know that God made them for a specific reason. The other reason knowing this is so important is that there is no guarantee of happiness. An addict has often spent a very long time pursuing happiness and good feelings. Pursuing God’s purpose does not always mean happiness and good feelings, although it does mean fulfillment.
If you ask a former addict how they stopped using their substance of choice, most of them will tell you through their faith. What they mean by this is that they believed they had value because of their higher cause, and they began to pursue God instead of a temporary high. They learned to accept that sometimes life is unpleasant because they came to place their hope in something better for their future.
It can be really difficult to figure out what to believe in when in the throes of addiction. The addiction cycle becomes so miserable and depressing that the addict is desperate to escape. However, what the addict must go through to escape is complete torture. It takes a real dependence on God to get through the misery of detox and resisting urges to get high. It takes a complete change in paradigm to leave behind old friends and lifestyle. This kind of change rarely happens without something dramatic. Perhaps this is why Alcoholics Anonymous was founded on the idea of giving the addiction over to God. Perhaps this is why many, many thousands have given up their addiction through the programming at Celebrate Recovery.
If you or your teenager is stuck in the horrific cycle of addiction, try everything you can to hold onto the promise of God’s love. There is no guarantee that you will be happy sober. However, there is the promise that if you pursue God’s purpose for your life you will feel like you have meaning; you will feel as though you have something to offer the world after all this time of feeling worthless.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Our families need to connect. Each of us needs to feel important to the others. This is impossible if we’re always checking, texts, emails, snaps, Instagram, etc. We get frustrated that our teenagers are on their phones 24/7, but are we any better? Most adults I know have their cell in their hand or in their pocket. It’s never more than arm’s length away. You entire family needs some coordinated time without any form of electronic entertainment. Believe me, at first it feels weird. Eventually though it feels great!
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
It can be difficult to control what your teen is doing with their cell phone. Image courtesy of Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I never cease to be surprised in my job. You would think after enough years of sitting across the counseling room with teenagers that I’d have heard it all. For the most part, I have. However, their ingenuity with technology continues to boggle my mind. It’s all I can do to keep up with them, and they’re freely admitting to me how they misuse technology to do sneaky things. I can’t imagine how challenging it is for parents to try and figure out which app is being used for what, how to track what kind of pictures your child is posting and viewing online, and who in the world they’re talking to.
I will share what I know based on what I hear in the counseling room:
Firstly, most teenagers are using their cell phones appropriately. The majority of kids are not sneaking. They use their phones to call home, and to text their friends. They keep up with their friends on Snapchat and Instagram. They post things you’d be entirely fine with their grandma seeing, and a lot of them even “unfollow” people they know who post things they shouldn’t be. This is their social hub. This is how they are informed when someone is having a party, a group of people are going to the beach, or getting together to see a movie. They text one another questions about homework. They send encouragement if they’re having a bad day. They tell mom and dad if they change locations when they’re out with friends.
There are also a significant number of adolescents who are misusing the privilege of having a phone. Really, it’s the unrestricted internet access that’s the problem. Just texting and making phone calls is rarely the issue for a teenager. Even if you have the most sophisticated parental blocking system on your teenager’s cell phone, there is always a work-around. For example, most programs don’t block things on Facebook and Instagram. If you type in the right search terms, you can find pages dedicated to uploading pornographic images. Your teenager might also be trying out “Kik.” This is an app that allows chats with strangers, and the conversation history can be deleted. I have worked with more than one kid who met someone they thought was nice on Kik, but I was left wondering if they were a masquerading child sexual predator. In both cases these “girls” sent inappropriate photos to the adolescent boys I was working with. They tried to get information about the boys and asked for photos in return.
Here’s the main point: Be extremely careful when your child has a smart phone. You have to know how to check through their phone from time to time to see what they’re up to. More innocently, sometimes teenagers sign up for sites and input their home addresses and phone numbers. They don’t mean anything by it, but it still gives out information you might prefer be kept private.
The data plan on a phone definitely is a privilege. It seems like most teenagers now consider it a requirement for their survival, much like food, clothes and shelter. Do everything you can to teach them responsibility with their phone. A lot of teens are getting into things simply because they don’t have supervision on their phones, and don’t yet have the brain development required to really recognize the danger they might be in (that comes in late adolescence, which is the early 20s). I’ve noticed this most frequently with apps like Tinder. I wish I could promise you your teen is smart enough not to meet strangers from apps like Tinder, but enough of them do it that I can’t make you that promise. It’s really tough on parents to keep up these days, but it’s essential to your teenager developing healthy habits.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Use of e-cigs, or vaping, has increased in teenagers dramatically. Anecdotally I have seen a tremendous upswing in the number of teens using nicotine and marijuana ever since electronic cigarettes came out. It has been particularly pronounced in the last two years. Apparently studies support this. Studies also show that use of e-cigs has a high correlation to eventual cigarette use.
Check out this infographic from National Institute on Drug Abuse; National Institutes on Health; and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
This should warn us all that adolescents are much more willing to try vaping than cigarettes. Since they were small children, teens have been socialized to think cigarette smoking is “disgusting,” and “dangerous.” Because vaping smells much better (if it smells at all), and because most teenagers aren’t aware of the dangers, some try it. They truly think they’re inhaling water vapor. This is simply not true.
A study was just released from the University of California at San Francisco that definitively links e-cig use to cancer causing toxins. The saliva and urine was tested in non-using teens, vaping-only teens, and teens who both smoke cigarettes and vape. While the highest amounts of the toxins were in the group the used both, a significant amount was also in the group that vaped. The group who didn’t use at all didn’t have these toxins in their bodies. More on the report written about this study can be found at http://abcnews.go.com/Health/teens-cigarettes-show-evidence-toxic-chemicals-smokers-study/story?id=53537714.
Here’s the bottom line: vaping is very dangerous for your adolescents. The devices used to vape can look like a USB stick, wifi connector, credit card, a tiny black square, fancy pen, highlighter, etc. You won’t smell smoke either. You have to ask your teen outright, and keep track of their social media pictures. If you suspect your teen might be vaping, but they won’t tell you the truth and you can’t definitively pin it on them, call their pediatrician. They can order a nicotine test on your child (which won’t cover everything that can be vaped, but it will tell you quite a lot).
If you need to talk more about your teen’s potential addiction, we’re here to help. Give us a call.
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
He finally had the strength to end a toxic relationship! (Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net)
Okay, obviously that is a cheesy photo. However, once you’re out of a codependent relationship, and have gotten beyond the grief, this is how you’ll feel!
Anyhow, let’s get to the point. Ending a relationship from a codependent position is one of the hardest things you will ever do, or have ever done. You have recognized your friendship, dating relationship, sibling relationship, etc. has reached very unhealthy levels. You now realize that you are often drained of time, energy, emotional well-being, and a general feeling of joy after you are around the toxic person in your life. You feel manipulated, guilty and exhausted after you are with the person. You have asked yourself repeatedly, ‘Why do I continue to answer their phone calls?’ The person calls you whenever they are in crisis. The person always needs something that “only you” can give, whether it is money, time, a place to stay, or you name-it. When you can’t break out of this cycle, you are in a codependent relationship. Other terms you will frequently hear are enabler and coaddict.
So, the big question is, ‘How do I stop this crazy in my life?’ That’s really what it is too: crazy-making. You always leave a conversation feeling like the crazy one, but your friends all tell you it’s the other person. To end this kind of relationship takes very drastic measures. You have to come to a place of strength and reality. You need to take a very honest look at what has been happening between you and this person. Is this a truly reciprocal and healthy relationship? If the answer is “no” or, “It used to be,” then it is time to move on.
Once you have really looked at the relationship, you have to tell yourself, “I will no longer enable bad behavior. I am not responsible in any way for the outcome of this person’s life.” Truly, the person will get better or get worse with or without you.
Next, surround yourself with good friends or family who will keep you busy and keep you grounded in reality. The crazy-maker in your life is going to call you with a crisis because that has always worked. You will have to either not answer the call, or simply say over and over again, “You will have to call someone else with this problem. I have been unable to help in the past because you have not chosen to help yourself.”
Finally, you need to maintain firmly whatever boundary or rule you’ve set. If you told the toxic person you will not call them back in the middle of the night anymore, then turn your phone off at night. You get the idea…
Again, ending an enabling relationship is challenging beyond belief. However, once you’re through the mud and the muck of it, you’ll feel free. You’ll feel like the guy in the picture at the beginning of this blog post!
Helping teens grow and families improve connection,
Hello, I’m Lauren! If you notice your teen struggling, you might be feeling helpless, hopeless, frustrated or concerned as a parent. Try to remember, there is hope. I want to help your adolescent feel better. My hope is for them to enjoy their life again. I want them to feel confident they can handle whatever situations arise.
