How nice it was....We had a great turnout of parents and professionals in attendance. There was a whopping turnout of seventeen (17) parents. Some were familiar and others were brand new.
Val and Lloyd and Cathy were there as usual but we were also fortunate enough to have two professionals from C.I.S.P. in attendance. They were Marvin Randall and Ron Bell. Marvin heads up the Community Intensive Supervision Program which services the Wilkinsburg, McKeesport, Garfield, Homewood and the Hill District. It was good to see some new faces for even though all our stories are similar they are not the same and new wisdom is always conveyed.
I was introduced to a single mom who has some insight into "How to Drug Test Your Son" (It can prove embarassing to give a urine test to an adult son and she had a simple way to make sure the test speciman was his!) Look for her post which may be coming soon! Because of the full room we had time for only one role-play but we role-played it two ways. (One) With the teenager being in control and using the GIMME THREE STEP METHOD, NEVER THE LESS/REGARDLESS & I AM NOT COMFORTABLE WITH THAT methods (two) With the teenager being out of control and using the WE ARE GOING TO BE NICE ENOUGH TO LET YOU KNOW THAT WE ARE GOING TO HAND YOU OVER TO THE JUVENIAL COURT SYSTEM method. We had a newbee play the out of control teenager and he "brought down the house"! Bravo to him. In summation, my fellow-mom who sat next to me stated that "Our kids may always be manipulative" and yes, they probably will, therefore we must always and persistantly continue to keep the power in our homes. Thank you PSST for showing us the way to keep the power.
A Quick Summary of March 6th, 2010 Eastern Division, PSST Meeting
Posted by:Sally--Sunday, March 07, 2010
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Great Meeting! I would add that we also had a few parents feeling kind of uncomfortable. One was backing off her son a bit. He has successfully completed an inpatient treatment program. She is letting him make some of his own choices and maybe "giving him enough rope to hang himself". Other parents are dealing with their son leaving home. He has been clean for over two years but this is a big step. Another was dealing with letting her son have a one time pass and is now faced with the same situation again. We all have very uncomfortable situations to handle with our teenagers. These are steps we have, or we will, all face eventually. My wife and I recently turned over "enough rope" to our son. In a short while he tripped over it and we saw to it that he went back into inpatient treatment for a few more months. Yes it felt uncomfortable but we knew we had to do it. We had a song when our kids were young about how we wish we could always be there to pick up all of the sticks and stones in their path but that they eventually need to fall a few times to learn the way. Ironically this woman also sang the song "This is the Day We Give Babies Away". We loved that song too. Our son is already talking about "when he gets out". We have already given him the "We are not comfortable yet" talk (a very uncomfortable talk to give). But he will eventually work his way out and we will need to let go again and hope he gets it this time. Thanks to everyone for sharing. Thanks to PSST for helping. We hope to see you again.
I was surprised by how many parebts showed up for this meeting
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