ONLINE PARENTING COACH

Parents are the single biggest influence in their kid’s lives. Use your voice and let your kids know that smoking is bad news. Your adolescents may seem to be tuning you out and accuse you of lecturing, but they are listening. Discuss the dangers of adolescent smoking with them early and often. The smoking facts in this article have been compiled with adolescents in mind. Arm yourself with knowledge and information that will get your youngster’s attention. The ingredients and additives in cigarettes when burned, create toxic, harmful chemical compounds. There are over 4000 chemicals in cigarette smoke, and more than 40 of them are known carcinogens. Smokers inhale some pretty disgusting things with every puff: • Acetone It’s in nail polish remover and it’s in cigarettes. • Ammonia We use this chemical to clean our houses. • Benzene This chemical is used in manufacturing gasoline. • Carbon Monoxide It’s in car exhaust, and it’s in cigarette smoke. • Formaldehyd...

Runaway behavior for teens is usually not the result of a wish to have a Huckleberry Finn experience. It is often their dramatic way of dealing with longstanding problems or conflicts with family. It is believed that between 1 and 1.3 million teens in the United States live in emergency shelters or on the streets. Research indicates that the problem is more prevalent for adolescent girls. Homeless teens tended to be younger, female, and white. Further, these girls engaged in problematic behaviors, such as vagrancy, sexual promiscuity, prostitution, suicide attempts, and becoming pregnant. The types of runaway behavior were initially viewed dichotomously as "running from" or "running to" something. These include three categories: the youngster who runs away from family strain caused by a crisis; the youngster who runs away from excessive parental expectations and control; the youngster who runs away from a physically or sexually abusive situation. ...

Fifteen-year-old Rebekah Toia was bright and attractive and had lots of friends. She was an honor student at her High School, a softball player and loved writing fantasy stories and poetry. The night before she died, she had come home from a party, went into her room and an hour later came out and asked her mom if she could sleep with her. In the morning, her mother made pancakes for her. Rebekah took the dog out for its morning walk. When her mother left for work, each told the other, "I love you." When Barbara Toia came home from work Tuesday afternoon, she found Rebekah hanging by her neck from a cloth belt attached to the top of her bedroom door. She was not breathing. Her death – and that of 14-year-old Angelena Ohanessian who died the same way two weeks earlier – prompted Chicago police to issue an alert to parents about the dangers of the "choking game." Both girls, who didn't know each other, succumbed to the deadly game, they say. The point...