Experimenting With Drugs

My name is Alfredo A and when I first met my Parent Partner, my son Pedro had just started experimenting with drugs.

At that time, my wife of seventeen years had left us to go back to Honduras without giving us a reason for leaving. I was left with three teenage children, Lucy,16, Carol,14, and Pedro, 12.

Pedro seemed to take his mother’s leaving the hardest. He became introverted and kept to himself. He started hanging out with some rough kids from our neighborhood and staying away from home. He stole some sleeping pills and drugged himself to the point he could not even walk. I was scared and didn’t know what to do. I was losing him to the streets!

We have very modest means and he would always demand more money to keep up with the kids who run in gangs. I began to feel like a failure as a parent. I had no idea how to communicate with my children. All my life I had always provided for my family financially but had almost no say in the day-to-day parenting— that had always been my wife’s job. My Parent Partner taught me communication skills that I could use with my children. She helped me get Junior into counseling and to work on my relationship with him by listening to him and by giving him my time. We started having family meetings once a week where all the members of the family could express what was going on in their lives and what was bothering them. My Parent Partner helped me believe that a good father is not only defined by what you can provide financially, but by the time you give and the relationship you develop with your children.”