Parenting Strategies for Creating Drug-Free & Healthy Youth

Parenting Strategies for Creating Drug-Free & Healthy Youth includes easy to use substance use prevention with wellness tools for parents and guardians who want to produce active, healthy, successful, and substance-abuse free youth. These strategies are founded on the evidence-based Prevention Plus Wellness (PPW) Model, which targets naturally motivating positive images to effectively prevent substance use and promote wellness habits and positive self-identity. This book provides six short wellness "pep talks" designed to prevent marijuana, alcohol, tobacco and other drug use while increasing youths' wellness enhancing behaviors, including physical activity and sports, healthy eating and nutrition, monitoring calorie intake and weight, controlling stress, and planning for school success, depending upon their particular interests and needs. Also included are simple home contracts to help parents communicate clear behavior guidelines to their children and teens. Lastly, parent and youth health resources are presented to further increase youth knowledge, attitudes and skills to live healthy, happy and balanced lives. The parenting strategies in this book were designed to help youth look and feel more active, fit, healthy and successful by having them: 1. Identify wellness enhancing behaviors, along with risk habits that interfere with reaching wellness behavior goals and positive self-images; 2. Become aware of positive images of youth engaged in wellness promoting behaviors, and desired images of themselves in the future; and 3. Make a commitment to set and monitor multiple goals to increase wellness promoting behaviors, while avoiding wellness damaging habits. In addition to the step-by-step directions on how to use the parent wellness pep talks and other strategies in this book, each of the six pep talks contain the following materials: - Brief youth wellness behavior surveys; - Parent pep talk scripts for providing youth with positive wellness messages; and - Goal plans for motivating multiple positive behavior changes among youth. This book provides parents, and others concerned about youth health and safety, with easy to use and enjoyable tools to promote positive wellness behaviors and identity, while also preventing youth substance use and problems.