Preventing Substance Abuse & Addiction in Children and Adolescents: for the parents who kept showing up , young people found their way back .

Somewhere around fourteen, maybe fifteen, someone will offer your child drugs: a classmate or a kid at a party. Usually somebody you already know and probably like. Most parents find this out years after it happened, or they never find out at all. I spent over twenty years in addiction care in the Netherlands, much of it doing outreach, which meant I didn't sit in an office waiting for people to show up; I went to them in schools, streets, living rooms. I sat with teenagers who were already using and with parents who had no idea, and I can tell you the gap between those two groups is usually about two years of signs that were there but didn't look like signs. That's why I wrote this book. Not to scare you, and definitely not to tell you what a bad parent you've been. You've had enough of that. What you'll actually get: why "just say no" never worked and what to do with your kid instead, broken down by age from 3 through 18; the real warning signs and the ones parents misread all the time; how to have the conversation so your child keeps talking to you afterward; what to do when you're past prevention (who to call, how fast, and the well-meant mistakes that push kids further away); and a quick-reference section for when you need to know what to do tonight, not after six chapters. Some of what's in here comes from research and school programs I've helped build. A lot of it comes from specific kids I worked with: a girl who asked for help in the only way she knew how, a boy who used so he wouldn't be attacked in his sleep. Their names are changed; what they taught me isn't. You can't keep the world away from your child. You can make sure they're ready for it. That's what this book is for.