Friends Helping Friends
Keeping Adolescents in Check and Providing Early Intervention

The following is a general description of Friends helping Friends Intervention Guidelines. A fundamental purpose of this initiative is to advance intervention before it is apparently needed. We are developing, refining and testing the efficacy and effectiveness of selective and indicated drug abuse prevention and intervention guidelines. Guidelines that combine random and targeted drug testing and intervention concepts designed for Christian adolescents worldwide.

This initiative seeks to identify risk and genetic factors, peer pressure, and negative life experiences that may be associated with substance abuse and addiction in order to design and implement comprehensive guidelines that are sensitive to adolescents needs.

Rather than treating adolescents as juvenile delinquents, your staff will offer individual and group counseling, Christian support groups, and Finding Ourselves Within Meetings.

We implement what is known from drug abuse prevention research with what is unknown, in particular, about individual adolescents experiences and how structured youth groups, counseling and self-help meetings work together to help equip individuals to be able to face life's complex problems and live free of drug, alcohol and tobacco abuse; also to prevent violence, high-risk behavior and other forms of defiance and carelessness.

Adolescents need to talk in a support group setting (without adults present) about traumatic experiences and integrate these experiences into their understanding of themselves and of life in general. When adolescents have the opportunity to discuss, share, and compare experiences with peers, the trauma loses its dominance over their consciousness and begins to diffuse. 

Friends helping Friends Intervention Guidelines provide advice, support, and information to young people experiencing difficulty because of their own substance misuse or that of someone else; and parents, families, and friends who may be concerned about a young person's substance use or a behavior problem.

We invite parents to sign a waiver to enroll families in Friends helping Friends which would allow and mandate random and targeted drug testing. You will use your church phone and staff to provide a Hot Line where friends can report others who are possibly using tobacco, alcohol, and drugs or are engaged in illegal, problem or detrimental behavior. We have designed a database to help you log calls and maintain your personalized program.

We stress the need for all adolescents to be enrolled, whether they have had problems, are suspected substance abuse, have a potential for addictive behavior, or not. This will help other parents where substance abuse runs in the family or is a potential factor. 

We ask that parents of offenders enroll their children in structured enjoyable after school and summer activities that enhance learning, stimulate creativity and help keep kids out of trouble. These innovative activities that your church will design and offer will be made available and used as learning enhancements for good kids who never get in trouble as well. That way everyone can participate together in well-funded, well-crafted locally designed activities that teach discipline, respect and academic and technical skills without embarrassment.

Substance abuse is synonymous with high-risk behavior and/or other forms of defiance. 

Remember, there can only be positive results in keeping your children, their friends and acquaintances - in Check. 

These guidelines have proven to be a major deterrent in our fight against substance abuse, high-risk behavior and the array of co-partners.

We will come to your Church and give a five-minute presentation and let them know that we have a booth set up and hope to see them after the service. We provide literature for families to get acquainted with our mutual endeavor. After our initial visit your staff will coordinate weekly sign-ups with families. You will be asked to remind families at your Sunday Service to enroll in Friends helping Friends at your church office. 

After your program has been successfully initiated, if you want us to do our Follow Up Youth Seminar to prompt Friends to help Friends you can call and make arrangements. We stress the importance of prevention and early intervention for substance abuse, high-risk behavior, gangs, violence, guns, graffiti, tagging, tattoos and body piercing. We focus on a healthily lifestyle for others and ourselves: through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

We provide professional athletes, sport videos, a light show and a band.


What About the Other Programs?

A Survey of Results showed that youngsters involved in secular drug prevention programs, as compared to those not involved, engage in a similar number of inappropriate behaviors or even more inappropriate behaviors.

Friends helping Friends has developed needs-specific guidelines for Church going families: families that are involved in their children’s lives. Parents play a tremendous role, a huge role, in what's going on in their children's lives.

These guidelines are based on Christian ethics that have been proven to be effective in detouring, decreasing and delaying drug, alcohol and tobacco use and increasing bonding with peers and family. We have taken ideas from the best secular models and combined them with Christian ethics to create these hybrid guidelines.

Why Christian based guidelines

Human plans and programs for the purification, uplifting and protection of our children will fail more often than not. Why? Because they don’t address or reach the sinful nature. The only power that can create and perpetuate health-minded children, the only power that can change the rebellious and sinful nature of children is the Spirit of God. “Not by might nor by power, but by My Spirit, says the Lord Almighty.”

We cannot create a fix-all-program that will meet everyone’s needs. We cannot create a program for secular schools without the Christian message. And program needs for adolescents in Los Angeles will be very different from the program needs in Portland Oregon, or Okinawa Japan.

Too often we decide what's important to adolescents without checking with them. You need to spend quality time with the adolescents of your community to find out what's important to them.

That is why Friends helping friends offers guidelines, not a program, to keep adolescents in Check and assist in early intervention.

Each child is blessed with a prospective potential - potential for loving, for learning, and for making life better for others. Yet each year thousands of young people destroy or impair this potential and risk their lives by using illegal substances, engaging in high-risk behavior, running with gangs, using violence and the like.

That is why the first goal of Friends helping Friends strategy is to educate the world's young Christian population on the dangers of substance abuse and to help them resist the temptations of drugs, alcohol, tobacco and high-risk behavior. We want to use Christian peer pressure to get to the kids, because the majority of the kids are being good. Peers can help educate peers when given the chance. We need to raise awareness of the evils of gang relations, violence, guns, graffiti, tagging, tattoos and body piercing: to resist the devil and his temptations.

Among our greatest allies in this mission are Christian parents, teachers, students, and police officers participating in Friends helping Friends. The challenge is to gather critical components of other prevention programs and combine them with Christian ethics and promote their adoption, implementation, and diffusion throughout the Christian community worldwide.

Unlike many other organizations, Friends helping Friends requires the direct participation of youth. An effective program will also train youth Christian-based resistance skills and general social skills, with an emphasis on resistance and assertiveness: through a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Programs also need to stress broad-based skills, which are certain theoretical constructs such as decision-making, goal setting, conflict resolution and communication skills.

Effective prevention and deterrent programs engage Church, parents and media programs or combinations of these. The following three aspects of random and targeted drug testing and the use of prevention guidelines will help constitute research knowledge: 

Significance and Size of Program Effects. 

Maintenance of Effect. Boosters, multiple program components in addition to after school and summer programs with community support. 

Adoption, Implementation, and Diffusion. Church body readiness for prevention; principal support for teaching a prevention program; existing, credible networks for diffusion.

The programs should try to address as many different domains as possible in a youngster's life. Here are five major domains: What are the issues for the individual? What's going on with the peer group? What's going on in the family? What's going on in the school? What's going on in the community? 


When should kids have a drug prevention program?

Ideally, it's before they need it. The average age of experimentation, of first use, is 12 ½.

Statistically, one in 10 people in this country have a drug or alcohol problem, and one in four people know someone with a problem. Children who come from families with substance abuse are more likely to develop a problem.

We need to address these issues before they become serious problems. Seventeen percent of eighth-graders used marijuana last year. Twenty-one percent used illicit substances. Nine percent of eighth-graders smoke daily.

We want to use Christian peer pressure to get to the kids, because the majority of the kids don't have a substance abuse problem. When you hear your youngster say, "Well, everyone's doing it, everyone's using," that's because maybe in his or her small social circle everyone is.

Can a poorly done drug program cause damage?

Yes. Some programs bring in ex-users who are not properly trained to speak to students, and it can seem to glorify it. Without a Christ centered message we have little chance. 

Our battle is not against drugs, violence, high-risk behavior and the like. But against principalities, powers and the rulers of this present darkness -- against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. Other programs, may look nice and make the community feel good because they can say they've done something. They give a false sense of security. We need to be really vigilant.


Statistics:

Teen-agers who have fathers and get along with their fathers are less likely to smoke, drink and use drugs than youngsters in average one-parent families. Teens in two-parent families who have fair or poor relationships with their fathers are 68% more likely to use drugs than those in the average two-parent household that was surveyed. In contrast, children reared by their mothers alone were 30% more likely to use drugs than those living in the average two-parent home.

Most teenagers find it easier to talk about drugs with their mothers than with their fathers. Fathers should ask themselves if they join with mothers in monitoring their teens' conduct; and how often do they eat meals with their children?

The study found that children who never have dinner with their parents have a 70% greater risk of substance abuse. Through these guidelines families can work together to face life's complex problems and live free of substance abuse, violence, high-risk behavior and the like.

Too many fathers are just AWOL in their kids' lives. They're not there to share childhood experiences with them, help with homework and kids don't go to them with important problems.


When working with adolescents, adults should remember the following:

Keep it together. It's OK to get upset and express other feelings verbally - as long as emotional control remains intact. If you can't handle it, how can he or she be expected to handle it?

Don't make promises you cannot keep. If you don't know, say, I don't know, but I will try to find out. Promises such as everything will be all right, are dangerous because they tend to minimize the seriousness of the event.

Don't act like a policeman. Instead, support the youth as he or she copes with the inevitable investigation. The focus must be on the young person's needs at this time.

Don't disrupt the structure of youths' lives more than necessary. Be sensible about expectations, and reduce the stress through avoiding introducing unrealistic new tasks or duties.

Don't withdraw from young people’s crises. Acknowledge privately to them that things may be difficult right now, but that you are willing to help him or her succeed. Then do it.