What do we do?
Parents have a significant influence over their children throughout their lives, including their teenage years, so working in partnership with parents is a more effective approach to changing young people’s understanding, attitudes and behaviour in relation to drugs and alcohol than going alone. Including parents and carers in drug and alcohol education is essential if students are to be as well-equipped as they can be to stay safe.
We deliver interactive workshops for parents and carers that involve:
- finding out about young people’s exposure to drugs and alcohol
- factors that affect young people’s decisions about drugs and alcohol, including teenage brain development
- what young people and parents need to know about the risks of drugs and alcohol
- practical suggestions for what they can do to support their children to stay safe
- where to go for more information and support.
Under Covid19 in Spring 2020 we moved all our parents’ workshops online and these have proved incredibly popular with both schools and parents. They’re much easier for schools to organize, especially if we do this for them on our Zoom account, and it’s much easier for parents to come along to a workshop online at the end of the day than head off out to the school. Perhaps as a consequence numbers have generally been much higher than usual. At one school where they usually struggle to get numbers into double figures at parents’ events we had over a hundred register.
Parents are able to submit questions confidentially online beforehand as well as during the evening, and we provide a leaflet for schools to send on afterwards that covers all the key information covered in the workshop and more, as well as a recording of the session for parents unable to attend.
To hear Fiona tell her son Dan’s story and find out what a workshop covers, watch this short (three minute) film:
Feedback from parents
“Excellent, very informative and facilitated in the right tone. Not easy to achieve given the subject matter – well done DSM for what you’re doing for both parents and teenagers.” Parent
“Thank you for organising such a great webinar for parents last week. I thought that Fiona and Asha delivered the webinar at exactly the right level, it was really informative, but in quite an upbeat kind of way, a difficult balance to find but they did it so well and I was glued to the screen.” Parent
“I thought it was the best parent evening we’ve had. So thorough and professionally devised and delivered. Best practice!” Head of PSHE
