Make them work!!

Unless your teenager is a 4.o student with too little time as it is.....Make them hold down at least a part-time job. And if you make a ton of money and are more than willing to dole out money whenever they ask for it--Stop!! You are doing the wrong thing by spoiling your child. Take it from me.

I was not a "spoiled" kid. But let's say, I never did without. At the age of sixteen I suggested to my mother that I get a job, she said "I don't think you need to work so early, I want you to enjoy your teen years as long as you can". Then as a senior in high school I did get a part-time job (well actually I only worked ten hours a week) so that I could leave school at noon because I was in the "work program" for seniors with enough credits to graduate and still leave at noon.

I continued to "work" part-time my first year out of high school but I would hardly called what I did work. And eventually after getting more heavily into drugs I had to leave that job after Thanksgiving. After that it all went down-hill and my family made it easy for me to slack by paying my rent and bills whenever I called to whine about being unable to make it. The truth is I am almost thirty years old and have no work ethic whatsoever. And I am not alone!!

If you want your kid to make it outside of your home after high school, make sure they have had some experience working at least part-time. If you're worried that their grades will suffer, don't be. Worry more about their inability to work after high school. That is unless you plan on paying their expenses forever!!

Don't make it easy on them....

If you have a habit of being in bed when your teenager arrives home in the evening, change this habit. I know that getting enough sleep is important to all you busy parents out there, but trust me on this one.

You see, when I was growing up I rarely had to worry about facing my parents when I got home on the weekends. This is because they went to bed very early. Oh sure, I had to wake them up when I got home to tell them I was home for the night but that didn't make it hard to conceal my "condition" from them when I got home, which was often times High or drunk. Their early sleep habits made things way to easy for me to indulge in teenage drug and alcohol consumption.

If you have a spouse to share the responsibility of seeing what condition your kids come home in great, take turns!! And no, you don't have to be awake every time they get home. But if your child thinks there is a good chance they will be facing a parent when they get home for the night, they are probablly much more likely to arrive home sober. Remember, people who begin using drugs before the age of eighteen are more likely to become addicted to those drugs versus recreational users.

One thing she did do right........

I was a "bad kid". Sure, I made good grades in school and I never got in trouble for skipping school, or for fighting. But I did a lot of drugs and I began having sex at the age of 15. However, shoplifting was not one of the behaviors my parents had to deal with. And why was that?? Well, it goes back to an incident that occurred when I was just four or five years old.

I was with my mother at the wal-mart in the town we lived in. Now, at the time my parents were relatively poor and I was not spoiled at all. While we were standing in line to be checked out I asked my mother for a pack of gum and she said "no". I wasn't allowed to eat much junk food and she had only a few dollars to grab whatever it was she was buying to make for dinner that night. Unbeknownst to her I snuck the pack of gum in my pocket and walked out the door with the stolen gum. However, I wasn't smart enough to keep it hidden from her once we started our journey home and pulled the gum out of my pocket to grab a stick to chew on the way home.

My mother yelled "Young lady, where did you get that!"

I replied, with a stupid smirk on my face, "I put it in my pocket.....But they didn't see me.....".

"You stole it from the store? Don't you know that is wrong?"

I started to cry, and told her I was sorry--thinking that was all I'd have to do make amends. I was wrong.

"You don't owe me an apology. You owe the store an apology...." That is when she whipped the car around and started back towards Wal-Mart. I remember feeling shear terror as the car got closer to the store. "Where are we going mommy. The house is that way" I pointed in the other direction hoping my fearful expression would cause her to turn back around. But she didn't.

My mother made me walk back into the store, to the cashier who had just checked us out and tell her what I had done and that I was sorry. I was in tears and overcome with embarrassment.

Moral: When your kid does something like this make them face the consequences immediately!!! Worked for my parents. That was one thing she did right.

Your kid doesn't need a friend........

So, you want to be a friend to your kid??? Forget that people!! This is one of the biggest mistakes a parent can make. Your kid has an entire school full of "potential friends" and only two (or one) parent.

I know, some of you are worried that you will be a hypocrite if you punish your kid for smoking weed......... cause you did and you turned out all right, right? Believe me, treating your teenagers experimental use of marijuana as no big deal is a BAD idea. That isn't to say that you need to send them to some drug rehab either. But drugs today are not the same as they were 20 years ago. I personally began smoking pot at the age of 13 and that lead to a 15 year addiction to a variety of very scary and dangerous drugs. By the time I was finishing high school I was addicted to opiates, meth, alcohol and Xanax-which is the most dangerous drug of them all in my opinion but we'll talk about that another time.

So what should you do? Well, if they are still living under your roof you have a right to demand that they not use or bring drugs into your home. Yes, that means searching their stuff. But be reasonable here. I am not saying that they don't have a right to some privacy and this is where you have to decide where to draw the line for yourself. I hate to idea of grounding because that is how my parents punished me for everything from bad grades to coming home so drunk I couldn't walk at age 15!! And it was quite ineffective. But you have to make your kid suffer and I do mean "suffer" some kind of consequences everytime they do wrong. Just bear in mind that when you ground them you may be grounding yourself.

What's wrong with the world..........

It is my opinion that this country is going to hell in a hand-basket because people aren't parents to their kids like they used to be. More people in my generation grew up in single-parent homes, or with step brothers and sisters, or with their grandparents, or.....the list goes on. And the reason people aren't being the parents that their parents were is because they either can't be or they won't be.

Those that can't be can't because the government won't let them. They are too busy working or are in prison for non-violent drug-offenses, or have had their kids taken from them by some agency like CPS!!

In this blog I am going to share with parents some good parenting moves from my own pt of view,warped as it may be.