Information Related to "When Parents and Friends Clash"
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Did you hear the one about the motorcyclist who was barreling
down the highway with his jacket collar flapping in his face? To remedy
the constant battering, he pulled over, removed his jacket and put it
on backwards. Then he roared back onto the road at full throttle. It
wasn't long before he collided violently with another vehicle.
Ambulances rushed to the scene. Paramedics began working on the victims. Shortly, a doctor arrived and stepped over to several attendants who were tending to the mangled motorcyclist. "How's he doing?" asked the physician.
One of the paramedics looked up with a grimace. "Not so good," he said, shaking his head. "He was breathing when we got here, but by the time we got his head turned around straight, he was dead."
Jokes aside, do you know where you are headed? Sometimes parents are concerned
about the friends their children choose and sometimes they can react a
little too quickly. They may think your friends are headed in the wrong
direction, and that they will drag you down with them.
Perhaps the most difficult area for many parents to understand is the pressures and pulls that many teenagers face. When your parents were in school, students didn't kill other students or faculty. Armed guards and surveillance cameras and metal detectors were not issues. While the world has changed in recent years, parents still want you to be safe and successful. So it is easy for them to overreact! The stakes are much higher these days and mistakes in judgment can be critical.
If you have friends that your parents don't like, let me give you some advice based on lots of experience. As a father of four (my youngest is an older teen), I have seen lots of schoolmates over the years. One young man actually lived on our deck for a few nights before we discovered him huddled in a corner! He felt he was safe on our property, but lacked the courage to ring the doorbell.
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