This week’s episode is the second part of the conversation we began last week in episode #42 with my guest, Kriya Lendzion, an addiction and prevention specialist and adolescent clinician.

Last week we discussed how today’s substances are vastly different from those of our youth, why our kids try them to begin with (despite all our warnings), how easily they can become addicted and how we should try to keep them from using any addictive substance for as long as we can.

In this week’s episode Kriya helps us understand boundaries around using substances, tells us how we can use “creative consequences” to help replace their desire to use substances, how to help them refuse substances and keep their “cool points” and most importantly, perhaps, how we should respond to them when we discover they’ve used substances despite all of our efforts.

Access TRANSCRIPT here.

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Sources, Resources and Mentions:

Kriya Lendzion (her website is currently going under alterations so direct links to the following are not working correctly - just go to her site and...

Under her Blog tab at the top, navigate to these articles: 

"How to Respond When We Discover our Kids Drinking or Using Drugs"

"10 Tips for Becoming a Teen Communication Jedi."

Under her Resources tab, click Parents and scroll down to Adolescent Brains and download "Grown Ups Guide to the Adolescent Brain (and how to parent it)"

The resource for parents she mentioned in the episode (more under parent resources on her site):

Get Smart About Drugs - DEA Parent website. Comprehensive info on latest teen use trends, news stories, and research.

FREE MEMBERSHIP Finally, Under her Resources tab for Parents, click on her Members Only sign-in, plug in your email, and right above the "Submit" button type "neurogility podcast" and you're in and can access her other resources for life!