Interacting with your Child
It is my hope that parents will take time to consider these issues, as we must do with any serious issues that concern our youth, with hopes that meaningful discussions, together with our youth and qualified professionals, can be started, and efforts can be initiated toward finding helpful and purposeful deterrents and alternatives to these most unhealthy and alarming trends.
If nothing more, at least take time to strongly discourage your children and any with whom you share a close, trusting relationship, to abstain from engaging in these dangerous and foolish practices, no matter what type of peer pressure they may face. All of them can at least be confirmed as ridiculous at best, injurious or even life-threatening at worst.
Sharing with youths some of the obvious and hidden dangers of such practices, along with demonstrating our awareness and concern for their overall well-being might prove at least a form of redirecting them from these practices, and may even cause them to open up with what they have seen or heard regarding them.
I know that discussions have already started, but more is needed, and the assistance of more getting involved and taking action is also necessary.
References: I got my information primarily from an online article entitled “Parents Beware: 11 Dangerous Teenage Trends All Parents Should Know About”, as posted on June 6th, 2012, by a Ms. Elizabeth Martinez. This was an article featured on the Parent Society website, the link to which is included below. Other general information was obtained through observing various news segments, and personal research done in random newspapers and on YouTube. No other particular source, other than the one mentioned above, was used as a specific reference, for the purpose of this written segment. http://www.parentsociety.com/parenting/parents-beware-11-dangerous-teenage-trends-all-parents-should-know-about/1/
Thank you to those mentioned above for your care and concern, and you’re putting your thoughts about these tragic trends in writing, and publishing them for concerned parents like me to appreciate. Thank you also to any and every one taking an active, involved role in the challenge and responsibility of mentoring and positively admonishing our youth. We may take different approaches in trying to tackle such problems, but all sincere, positive efforts are both needed and appreciated.
This is not by any means the extent of pressures our youth face, as there are many others, too many to mention here. However, if you come in contact with children who are old enough to engage in these or other unhealthy practices, please try to talk some sense into them, and discourage them from doing these and any other harmful, unnecessary things in the pursuit of so-called fun or recreation! Sparing even one child or one family the pain and consequences resulting from participating in these acts is worth the time it will take to start a conversation.
This Article Appeared in The Black Truth News Volume 4 Issue 3