Parents--Read This!

Being a parent to young children seems to mostly be made up of a million assorted insignificant tasks that make you feel like you’re just running on a treadmill forever and ever amen. Until, that is, you have a day like I had yesterday, and you get a little teary when you realize that indeed all the little things day after day have added up to something very important after all.

Yesterday morning I was sifting through my post-trip inbox and had 2 forwarded items from a friend. A lot of times I delete those right off, but this time I decided to see what they were. The first was an email chain letter where if I would forward it on to X number of friends within a few minutes something good would happen to me, and if not I guess I was doomed. I took my chances and decided to look doom square in the face. How does annoying my friends benefit me, anyhow?

Second item was a story supposedly written by a police officer about how his young teen died from huffing from a can of compressed air. I have no idea if the story is true, but the good thing about this was that after reading it I realized that although I had talked with my oldest child about smoking, alcohol, drugs, and pornography, I had never thought of huffing.

So later in the day he was doing his school classes online and I came in and said, "Hey, I read of something today that I realized I should tell you about. Have you ever heard of huffing?"

SULLEN: Huffing? No. What's that.

DM: (relieved! He hasn't even heard of it. Yay!) Well, it's this thing that people can do to get high where they inhale the stuff from an aerosol can.

S: Oh. That. Yeah, kids were doing that at camp.

And so it went.

My son went to 4H camp a couple weeks ago and had the priviledge of being in "outpost" which means they camp out instead of having a cabin. It's only for kids that have been to camp at least 1 year before and have had good behavior. They have an adult counselor plus 2 junior counselors that stay with them, and they cook all their meals by camp fire and have a lot more freedom than the cabin kids.

My son told me that the adult stayed in a separate tent and went to sleep one night before the kids did. (smart guy, eh?) One of the junior counselor's was also asleep. But the remaining JC and campers were awake at night and the JC took 2 cans of deodorant out of his bag and said, "Hey guys! Let's get high!" All the kids gathered round to huff their brain cells away.

Except two.

My son said "no way" and apparently helped another kid also say no when he was kind of on the fence.

Even knowing nothing about huffing, he had the good sense to know that anything in a spray can is something that doesn't belong in your body.

Later he got ahold of one of the cans and read the ingredients and saw propane listed. Nice.

I asked my son why he hadn't told me about this before and he said he didn't even really know what they were doing so it hadn't struck him as something to hurry and tell about. He had just known he wasn't going to suck up deodorant.

I called the 4H director and told her what I had learned, and my son talked with her and gave her the story, so I guess there are some parents around here finding out some pretty upsetting things about their kids today.

It really shook me up to know that I hadn't prepared my child for this issue and he had already been faced with it. But I was SO thankful that the principles that we live by and his strong personality and ability to stand for what he believes in were the things had indeed prepared him to handle a situation like that even without understanding it fully.

I guess all those days on the treadmill really are adding up to something great.

What do you need to go talk to your kids about today?