July 14th Meeting at Alliance Office (Parent Empowerment!) Posted by:Lloyd Woodward--Sunday, July 15, 2007

This meeting started at 9:05, pretty early for us, and by 9:10 we had 11 parents present. This was a great meeting- thanks everyone who showed up to help us out.



We took a break at 10:25 and we came back at 10:40 for a couple of versions of one role-play. We ran a bit over and ended out meeting at 11:45.

The focus of the meeting was empowerment of parents who are working with Probation Officers. Parents who share the blame with, or in some cases just assume the blame, get the power.

Only guilty people are effective. What are we guilty of? As parents, especially PSST parents, we are guilty of stopping at nothing to insure that our kids are given another day clean; we are guilty of going the last and extra last mile to see that our kids are supervised, especially when we can't supervise them ourselves. We are guilty of using every tool at our disposal, including when possible, the Juvenile Probation system to give our teens another day drug-free, guilty of changing our minds when we see that we made a mistake; guilty of "snitchin" to the PO, the school, the counselor, the teen's other parent, the other teens parents, the police, etc., all because we have come to believe that secrets keep us sick. We are guilty of working harder on our teen's recovery than he works on his own; guilty of enabling our teen from the consequences of his own decisions and guilty of no longer enabling him from the consequences of his own decisions even though he has come to expect that from us.

Yes, the teens are correct when they blame us. We send them to boot camp. We send them to The Academy sanction unit. We take thier cell phones. We take thier driving privellegeds away. We stand up in Court and ask the Judge to place our teen in the longest or most effective program and when our teen says, "you put me away!" we can say "yes, I had a lot to do with it."

We are guilty of loving our kids and being willing to fight this disease with every weapon at our disposal. Yes, we admit that. Let's move on.