Parenting Teens Tip – What to do if Danger is Involved with Dr Liz

Transcript

Hi, Dr. Liz here with another tip from Lisa DeMaurice excellent book called Untangled all about preteen and teen girls. I think a lot of this book applies to teen boys as well, but that’s my personal opinion. So this is a really important topic in this video. I cannot promise that I will cover it in under two minutes, but let’s see what happens. Now. The important topic is what to do if a friend of your teen is doing something dangerous. So not your teen, but their friend. And they’re coming to you and they’re saying, Hey mom or dad, my friend is over-drinking or doing drugs or they’re cutting, or they have suicidal thoughts. What do you do now? This actually happened in my household. And I can tell you, the first instinct is to want to call their parents, call their friend’s parents immediately and let them know what’s going on.

What Dr DeMaurice says is don’t do that initially, right? Instead, what she recommends is that you advise your own teen to talk to their friend and say, “You know what? Your parents really need to know about this,” so that they can get you help. So will you either tell them, and then have them confirm with me that you told them, or will you go with me to a trusted adult and let them know? And they can tell your parents, a trusted adult, meaning a teacher that they trust or a school counselor. Or maybe even an older friend who’s, let’s say a cousin or something that’s in their twenties, or that may be you. Like, can you talk to my mom about this or my dad? And then they can talk to your parents about this. That’s what she recommends doing. Now, if the teen friend rejects both of these, which they may, then Dr. DeMaurice recommends is that you say to your teen, I’m going to read this because it’s an excellent statement.

“An adult needs to know what’s going on. If you don’t want to tell anyone, then I need to, I know you’ll be mad, but I care more about your safety than about you being happy with me all of the time.” Right? So that way your teen has acted ethically. They’ve let the friend know what’s going on and they’ve let the friend know like, Hey, your safety is really important to me, even more so than how you feel about me. And that really speaks volumes about the friendship generally and their value as a person. So this is not an easy situation. You may get tears from your own teen around this and not wanting to break that trust of the friend, but safety really does come first, particularly in this day and age when teen suicide dangerous behavior is pretty, um, pretty prominent now. So that is what she recommends. She covered some really hard topics in book. So again, I highly recommend it. All right. I don’t work with kids and teens, but I do work with their parents. So if you’d like some help with some of this stuff, then please feel free to give me a call or schedule an appointment online. My website is drlizhypnosis.com. Peace.

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Peace and Health,
Dr. Liz