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Do you think your child or adolescent may be using street drugs or abusing prescription medications like painkillers? Many moms & dads are faced with the difficult question of "Is my adolescent using drugs?" Read on to find out how to tell if your adolescent is using illicit drugs. Things You’ll Need: • A Drug Sniffer Dog for Hire • A Home Drug Test • A Notebook • An Adolescent Who You Suspect May Be Using Drugs • An Internet Connection • An Observant Eye • ADMINISTER A HOME DRUG TEST: Home drug tests are now available over-the-counter at most major drug store chains. Moms & dads can give their adolescent a drug test for marijuana, opiates, methamphetamine, cocaine and an array of other illicit drugs. • DOES YOUR ADOLESCENT ACT DIFFERENTLY? Drug users experience high highs and low lows. Is your adolescent giddy, talkative and energetic one minute and sleeping excessively the following day? Is your adolescent edgier and moodier than usual?...

Hi Mark, My daughter seems to constantly dwell on negative things, talks about death a lot. When she doesn't get her way, she makes statements such as hurting or killing herself. She's six years old!!! She'll hit herself in the head everytime she doesn't get her way. She has even said she wanted to kill me. She has very poor self esteem, (why I'll never know) she calls herself stupid and an idiot. These thing do not come from within our house. This morning she said she wanted to hurt her little sister. I'm very confused because we practice love and logic in our home. Consequences with empathy. We do not spank or yell. We let the consequence be their punishment. She brings me to tears with her behavior and scares me that she will hurt herself or someone else. I've been reading about childhood Bipolar. Do you think she could be Bipolar? But she turns the switch on and off with control; for instance she's never a problem child at school...

Is your kid rebelling, defying your curfew, or hanging out with questionable kids? Here's how to nip behavior problems in the bud. To be fair, no one has ever pretended that parenting a kid was going to be easy. Still, until your own kids reach that stage, it's tempting to believe your family will be immune to teen behavior problems. No, you tell yourself, your kid will never talk back, stay out too late or pierce her eyebrow. Dream on... Adolescents are basically hard-wired to butt heads with their moms & dads, says Stuart Goldman, MD, director of psychiatric education at Children's Hospital in Boston. "Adolescence is a time of rapid change for kids both physically and cognitively," he explains. "It's the task of the kid to fire their moms & dads and then re-hire them years later, but as consultants rather than managers." But that doesn't mean you have to take it lying down. With the right approach, you can troubleshoot ...