Creating a Positive Home Environment

As a parent, you are the one who sets the tone in your home in order to create a warm, loving, and secure place in which your children can grow and thrive.  Although it is impossible to completely shelter your children from stress and suffering, you can build a rich family culture that will help your children survive the difficulties and disappointments of life with strength and grace.  Here are some tips that you can use as you seek to create a positive home environment so that your children will mature into happy, healthy, and responsible adults who will be less likely to use drugs or engage in other risky or addictive behaviors.

1. Show your children that you love them.  When children are small, it’s easy to scoop them up to give them the hugs and kisses they need every day.  As your children grow, they still need you to tell them that you love them and will always love them no matter what happens.  Never use your words to tear your children down; instead, build them up emotionally with sincere praise and affection.  Doing so will help them develop a positive self-esteem that may protect against depression and other risk factors for addiction.
2. Be a good listener.  Demonstrate your love by asking your children questions and really listening when they speak.  It is so easy to only half-listen when you are feeling anxious or angry, when you are distracted by other responsibilities, and when you are busy thinking about how you will respond.  Instead, try to take a few moments every day to ask questions that will draw your child out and then really focus on the things your child wants to tell you.
3. Provide an orderly space.  Although everyone has a different tolerance for clutter—and we are certainly not suggesting that you must become a neat freak in order to be a successful parent—reasonably clean and uncluttered living areas contribute to a sense of peace.  They offer a space for your children to play when they are young and a place for them to relax and bring their friends as they grow older.
4. Provide a safe space.  This probably goes without saying!  Keep medications out of reach of younger children.  Don’t bring drugs of abuse into your home.  Think carefully about how you store the alcohol in your home, especially if you know that your older children may be tempted to abuse it.  Don’t allow people into your home who may hurt your children.
5. Establish and enforce limits.  All children need to have boundaries for their behavior, and they need their parents to enforce these boundaries through appropriate consequences.  In fact, studies have shown that an authoritative parenting style can help to protect children and adolescents from engaging in risky behaviors. 
6. Spend time with each other.  It can become extremely difficult to carve out time to spend with your children as they grow older and become more involved in many activities outside of the home, but you must do things together in order to maintain a close relationship.  You might try going out for ice cream, hiking or doing other outdoor sports together, or attending movies, concerts and sporting events together. Create your own rituals for celebrating holidays together in fun and memorable ways.  Remember to have fun together!
7. Be a good example.  While it is crucial to teach your children your values, it is even more important to live them out.  As the old adage goes, values are easier caught than taught.  Parenting must be the hardest job in the world, and all parents fail from time to time, so it is perhaps most important to ask your child’s forgiveness when you do fail them.  In your relationships with the people in your family and everyone else in your circle of acquaintances, seek to demonstrate the friendliness, honesty, kindness, respect, and perseverance that you desire to teach your children.
8. Be on the look out for signs of addictions.  Know how to recognize the signs of eating disorders and other behavioral addictions as well as of prescription drug, legal substance, and illegal drug abuse.  Also be prepared to intervene when necessary and do as much for them as you can while they are still minors and you have more legal options.

We know that genetics can contribute to the development of addiction, but genetics is not destiny—environment and personal choices are important, too.  Your children are autonomous individuals who are ultimately responsible for the choices that they make.  But we also know that the home environment exerts a tremendous influence over a person’s decisions and wish you all the best as you seek to create a warm and positive home for your children.