Parents have the responsibility of taking care of their children. This means providing them with a lot of love and care. They need to nurture the children’s emotional and spiritual needs as well. As part of their other responsibilities, parents must take active roles in preventing their children from unhealthy habits such as drugs, alcohol and other substances of abuse. Parents have to remember important ways to keep their children free of this problem.

Have open and honest talks with your children. This is a good way to communicate especially if you have teenagers in the family. Try to share your thoughts and feelings with them and they would do the same. Ask them about their ideas and opinions about drugs, smoking and drinking; if they see their friends doing this, try to find out how they feel about all these things. Let them feel that if they have problems you are there to help and support them.

Try to encourage your children to pursue their interests in sports, music, writing or anything that would bring positive results to their characters. These activities can keep them busy and prevent them from being with bad company who may introduce them to these unhealthy habits of substance abuse. These interests would also help develop their skills and promote their self-worth as well.

Try to develop a stronger bond with your children. Share activities with them or have a family day where all of you can just have fun and relax. Set aside a time to talk about your children’s problems and try to help solve them by guiding them to the proper attitude to solve such problems. You don’t have to impose, rather make it look like they should make the correct choices to avoid the problems they have. You can also help them build a strong adult relationship not only with you but also with their uncles and aunts and other adults in the family who have good influences on them.

As one of the role models of the family, you should practice what you teach. The children may follow their parents who smoke, drink or do drugs. If you smoke and drink, then you have to do some explaining to your children. If you don’t want to make any explanations, then just stop your smoking and drinking to avoid questions from your children.

If substance abuse problems already exist in the family, you need outside help like counseling or a therapist to guide you. It is important to get a counselor or therapist that your child is comfortable with and can eventually trust. The goal of the treatment is to help your child get free from the substance by encouraging positive and independent thinking, finding out your child’s inner most feelings and finally fostering a healthy attitude towards complete recovery. And the best of all, your child needs your continuing support, love and understanding as part of this treatment.

Jason Ladock

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