Substance misuse and other mental health conditions frequently impact the entire family system, making them also relationship issues. Family engagement can play a vital role in recovery for individuals with substance use issues and their entire family system. Families often end up in turmoil—especially if the turmoil is centered on a teenage child.
“They are urgently trying to figure out what to do to help their child—before it’s too late,” says chief operations officer Carl Baisden. “Sending them to Turning Winds is an important step and the parent workshop we offer once a month provides families with important tools to achieve the best possible outcome for their teens.”
On the first day of the two-day workshop, parents meet with renowned parenthood expert Foster Cline, the author of the Love and Logic books and co-founder of the Love and Logic Institute, a worldwide parenting organization.
The Love and Logic Institute is dedicated to making parenting and teaching fun and rewarding, instead of stressful and chaotic. Dr. Cline introduces practical tools and techniques that help adults achieve respectful, healthy relationships with their children. All of their work is based on psychologically sound parenting and teaching, and a whole-child philosophy.
“In this incredibly complex, fast-changing age, responsible kids are the only ones who will be able to handle the real world that awaits them,” wrote Dr. Cline and co-author Jim Fay in Parenting with Love and Logic. “Life-and-death decisions confront teenagers—and even younger children—at every turn. Many of the temptations of adult life—drugs, internet pornography, premarital sex, alcohol—are thrown at kids every day… How will our children handle such intense pressures?”
Many teens are unprepared for those temptations. “Unfortunately, many kids arrive at their challenging and life-threatening teenage years with no clue as to how to make decisions,” wrote Cline and Fay. While teenagers need to learn how to respond to difficult challenges with good decisions, parents need to avoid what Cline calls “ineffective parenting styles” that are unhelpful when it comes to raising responsible kids.
Cline understands that parents are trying their best and that theirs is not an easy task. “Children need thoughtful guidance and firm, enforceable limits,” wrote Cline and Fay. “We set those limits based on the safety of the child and how the child’s behavior affects others. Then we must maintain those limits to help children understand that they are responsible for their actions and will suffer reasonable consequences for actions that are inappropriate.”
The second day of the Turning Winds workshop is an “interactive, immersive experience where we go through clinical exercises with the parents and their child, improving communication and relationships within families,” explains Baisden. He, too, is full of empathy for parents facing a tremendous task.
“Parents usually have an intense emotional attachment to their kids, and sometimes that causes them to parent too much from an emotional standpoint instead of a logical or intellectual one,” says Baisden. “The workshop raises parental awareness of this dilemma. We give them tools to approach their children on a logical basis and help them to better detach from the behavior of their kids to enable them to move forward and take care of their kids at the same time.”
Parenting is hard. Parenting teens can be even harder, especially in the age of social media. We want to help you understand your teenager so you can improve your relationship with them.
To help you determine whether or not your teenager needs help, we put together a short test to give you an idea of the severity of your child’s behaviors and their need for help. Should your child come to Turning Winds, we offer the two-day parent workshop as part of a wide range of services. The therapeutic approaches at Turning Winds include character education, leadership development, health, wellness of body and mind, therapeutic and academic success, and outdoor therapeutic experiential education.
Turning Winds is a family-run residential treatment center combined with a fully accredited academic program specializing in working with youth who are struggling with mental health or substance use issues. Over the past twenty years, Turning Winds has matured into a sophisticated program that blends the benefits of a wilderness program, a residential treatment center, and a therapeutic boarding school.
Our mission is to rescue teens from crisis situations, renew their belief in their own potential, reunite them with their families, and put them on a sustainable path to success. Contact us online for more information, or call us at 800-845-1380. If your call isn’t answered personally, one of us will get back to you as soon as possible.
