~ mother of 15 year-old son
Our Parent Stories
“Before I joined a CHANGES parent support group:
Since I joined a CHANGES parent support group:
Once we joined a CHANGES group to obtain assistance, we still harbored the assumption that we could simply adopt some of its ideas and go on our way. But the truth was we needed more help than that, and in ways we did not realize. To our amazement, we soon found that other parents in the group perceived that we, not our daughter, should be the first ones to make adjustments. They encouraged us to re-evaluate our assumptions and goals as parents, and only after that process did they help us make a plan to deal with our daughter’s behavior–a plan that included other parents meeting with her on a frequent basis to assess her progress in meeting court and group objectives. In this way, the parents served as a buffer between her and us to avoid breakdowns in the plan. This approach ultimately worked very effectively to bring her home to stay under a new set of understandings.
In sum, the experience we had is a good example of what parents can achieve working together, committed to certain common sense principles and supporting one another.” ~ mother and father of 15 year-old daughter