Some Autistic Parents demand that their local school system pay for one-on-one certified and trained teachers to handle their kids. In listening to all these parents rational for their demands I must say that; I see your very valuable points.

However; I also believe that we all must take care of our own responsibilities in America and if one chooses to have children they roll the dice. Perhaps an Autism Child is not what they had hoped for, but it is indeed the reality they must deal with and take responsibility for of course. I do not believe that these Autistic Children should “Expect” the government to deal with this problem, as really the Government did not create it, The parents did.

I understand their hardship and always view every situation from every angle. You know I too have had difficulty in my own life, haven’t we all, as life is that way, but that is the way it is. I did not see anyone out there helping me during any times of hardship, nor did I expect them too? Yet many of these parents are now asking, no you are telling US and Everyone to pay for their responsibility, because it puts them at a hardship? Why? Or should I say why do they feel this way and believe that the taxpayer should pay for these costs, when currently there are 20-30 kids in a classroom for their own children?

Life throws us curves. In this case these parents have made a choice and took a gamble and threw the dice and now they appear to want to renege on the results? How very interesting indeed. Consider this and your responsibilities as a parent in 2006.

Lance Winslow

A family portrait can add beauty and life to your home. Where you hang a portrait can either add to or take away from its visual impact. The portrait should be hung where it can be seen, but it shouldn’t stand out like a sore thumb.

If you have the privilege of planning your family portrait before it’s taken, you can choose the portrait colors, frame and layout based on where you plan to hang it. For portraits that have already been taken, you can usually find a great hanging spot in at least one room of your home.

Hang Portraits to be Seen

A family portrait is meant to be adored by your own family as well as guests. The first choice to hang a portrait is usually the living room or dining room, but there are other hanging places you might not realize. Two areas often overlooked are the entrance and hallway. These are where your guests will enter and exit, and they’ll often notice whatever is hanging on the walls. An entrance is where your guests are first greeted by your home decor. Why not greet them with a beautiful family portrait?

Hallways are usually dull or dark areas of the home. You can hang a family portrait on your hallway wall and place two decorative wall lamps on each side of the portrait to draw attention to it. This adds light to your hallway and attracts attention to your portrait.

Another excellent location for family portraits is the wall along a staircase. Staircases have a natural way of highlighting what’s hanging on the walls around them. They provide additional framing for a portrait that makes it even more attractive. If your stairs are in an open area of the home, guests can see the portraits even if they don’t walk the stairs.

Hang Portraits Securely

No matter where you hang your family portrait, secure it well with sturdy picture hooks, and use molly bolts for very heavy portraits. A portrait should be secure enough to withstand any shaking in the room or wall that could cause it to fall. When hanging a portrait near stairs, be sure to hang it where it won’t get knocked down easily while people walk up and down the stairs.

Recreate Old Family Portraits

If you have an old family portrait you’d like to hang on the wall, but it’s just too fragile or worn to hang, you might consider having an oil painting made of the portrait. A skilled artist can bring out the best in any photo. Your family portrait is too precious to waste. You can preserve it as an oil painting on canvas, and transform your family portrait into a treasured work of art.

David De Groot helps art lovers around the world realize their dream of owning gorgeous pieces of art. Now, you can easily turn your favorite photos into beautiful oil paintings on canvas. Visit the Web site to learn more about this unique service: http://www.myreproductions.com/

“Every one else’s parent’s let them stay out as long as they want”

“All the fun happens after midnight”

“When I get to be a parent, I’m going to let my kids stay out as late as they want”

If any of the above statements sound all too familiar, you’ve probably done the “curfew thing” in your family. If not handled properly, curfew can become a battle ground with the parents playing warden to the teenage inmates, and kids sneaking out and/or not coming home in order to “prove” their independence.

Curfew can also be an area that can illustrate for us a useful model for managing the teenage years. Many times when a parent phones me about their teenager, they say something like “I can’t seem to control my kid.” What I find myself wanting to say is that may be the problem, trying to control vs manage the situation. A parent trying to control a teenager is like trying to make a gorilla wear pants, it’s only going to frustrate you and make the gorilla angry.

As children grow from the childhood years into the passage of adolescence, it’s important for parents to remember the purpose of parenting and the purpose of adolescence. Parenting is one of those rare jobs where one of the primary goals is to work yourself out of a job. One way this is done is by teaching the adolescent how to be more and more in charge of themselves. Interestingly enough, one of the major jobs of adolescents is to learn how to be more and more in charge of themselves.

Now in no way am I saying that teens should be allowed to do whatever they want. As a matter of fact, there are times when teens need more attention and structure than do younger children

The difference between trying to control vs manage a teenager is all in how you approach the situation. A management approach meets the following six key criteria, 1) The parents are clearly in charge, 2) the teen, over time, learns and earns the ability to be more and more in charge of themselves, 3) there is a clear map for continually building trust and responsibility , 4) the parents have a way to monitor the progress of the teen, 5) there are clear consequences when the teen demonstrates that they cannot be in charge of themselves (just like in the real world), and 6) there is a map for how to earn back trust and responsibility.

A solution I have seen work with many families that meets the six criteria of management vs control is what I call the “Enough rope to grow yourself” solution.

In this solution, the parents choose a beginning place to start the curfew, let’s say, for the sake of our example 10pm. If the teen is able to keep that curfew, (and I mean keep - no five or ten minutes late) for a certain period of time, let’s say, again for the sake of our example, six months, the curfew can be extended another fifteen or thirty minutes. If at any time during the six month period the teenager breaks curfew, the six month period begins all over again.

The numbers here are just for example, you can change them to fit your own unique situation.

Checking this out with the six criteria for managing teenagers we see that the parents are clearly in charge, the teen has a way to earn more responsibility and trust, the parents have a way to monitor progress, consequences are clear, and there is a map for re-building trust and responsibility when it is damaged.

The passage of adolescence can be difficult enough without a never ending power struggle for control. Taking a management approach can go a long way to helping parents work themselves out of a job and grow the teenager into a well functioning young adult.

Visit http://www.TheArticleGuy.com for more leading edge tips and tools for writing articles that bring you prospects, publicity and profits. You can also subscribe to our monthly Article Writing & Marketing Tips Newsletter. You are also invited to visit my Express-Start Article Writing Program for more information on the next article writing tele-seminar.

Over the past week or so I have been talking with parents of autistic children and many are fairly stressed out. And there seems to be a common theme amongst some of the more vocal parents over the support they are getting from their local school district.

It is widely known that one-on-one help for autistic children is indeed the very best thing to help them learn and educate them. Of course there is no way that the school districts can pay for this, as the classroom sizes in America are from 20-30 kids now and if a school district has 150 total Autistic Children that additional cost could bankrupt the district.

Indeed there is no reason Autistic Parents cannot get up every day and promote volunteers, training and donated supplies for this problem. Do a Video to play on Cable TV under the community media programs in their area to explain this problem and find volunteers who want to help the school and volunteer for the one-on-one programs. They can do radio PSAs and events.

It is the autistic children’s responsibility to do this, not demand that the government or taxpayer do it. And although it is not the autistic parent’s responsibility past their own son or daughter, I think they must get together and they need to think beyond self and design this program, document how they did it and then promote this program on a Website, eBook and see that others can learn from how they did it. That is what I think? Think on this in 2006.

Lance Winslow

It doesn’t have to be all or nothing.

“Mom, can I go to the mall with my friend Jenny?”
No, not after you came home late last night.
Well everybody else gets to.
I don’t care what everybody else gets to do, you can’t
You just don’t trust me
You’ve got to earn it
I have
no you haven’t
have too
have not
SLAM!!! etc.

If the above conversation sounds familiar, you’re probably the parent of a teenager. I especially love the “everybody else gets to do it” line. My parents response to that was “if everybody else stood on their head in the middle of the street at 3am in their underwear, would you?”

Probably would have.

I never understood what all that meant; but I do know that raising teenagers can be an extremely challenging task. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the parents of the teenagers I work with in my practice.

Now don’t get me wrong. Most teenagers are pretty OK people. The vast majority seem to stay out of the juvenile justice system and eventually become adults. It’s just that most of the teenagers I’ve worked with are 16 going on 26 and 16 going on 6, all at the same time.

There is a proverb that goes something like “raise a child in the way they should go and when they are old they won’t depart from it”. What that implies is at some point they are going to go away from it. Some families seem to go through the passage of the teen years with little or no struggle. Many other families find it one of the most challenging and at times, maddening stages for their family. Parents of teenagers really try hard to navigate these difficult waters. One of the areas that seem to be the most difficult for parents is the issue of trust. Let’s take a closer look at how trust operates in families with teenagers, how it sometimes gets damaged, and how it can be built back.

A few families seem to go along and never have any problems with or damage done to the trust level for their kids. Others can really struggle with this issue. One of the places families tend to get stuck is seeing trust as an either/or situation. The teen lies, breaks curfew, experiments with drugs, or something equally trust damaging. The parents feel like they have lost all trust in their teen. The problem, or the “sticking point”, here is how do you build the trust back from nothing? How do we set it up so kids can earn back trust? Viewing trust as a matter of degree can help create a map back to a trusting relationship.

Here’s an example of building a map back to trust as well as creating the structure to earn trust back. Let’s say the teen has broken curfew by a few hours. The first step is looking at trust on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 is the least amount of trust, 10 is the most. Let’s say that coming home late reduced the trust level from a 9 down to a 3. That’s a gap of 6 trust levels. Creating a map back to a high trust level will be difficult if you try to go from a three to a nine all at once. It’s just too big a leap.

The next step is to talk about and agree on what changes and/or behaviors need to occur to go from a three level to a four level; then from a four to a five; a five to a six; and so on. In this way several positive structures are set up. The parents have a way of monitoring their teens progress and the teen has something to work toward. In addition, there’s a built in incentive for the teen. In many families, trust is kind of like playing video games at the mall. In the video arcade, the more tokens you have, the more you can play. In much the same way, in families, the more trust you have, the more you can do.

At this stage many parents will ask “How do I know things are really different, that I’m not getting fooled?” That’s an excellent question and the best answer I can offer is simply to watch and see if the behavior matches the words. If it does, you’re on the right track. If the behavior doesn’t match the words, then you know someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes.

Trust is a crucial element during the sometimes difficult time of the teen years. If damage to trust occurs, first, remember that this is a common, although serious, occurrence. Second, begin building the road back to a trusting relationship. If you find yourself still stuck along the road, it may be time to call in some outside help in order to get unstuck.

And one last thing - the teen years do come to an end, and if you are really lucky, you get to live long enough to watch your children have teenagers too!

Visit http://www.TheArticleGuy.com for more leading edge tips and tools for writing articles that bring you prospects, publicity and profits. You can also subscribe to our monthly Article Writing & Marketing Tips Newsletter. You are also invited to visit my Express-Start Article Writing Program for more information on the next article writing tele-seminar.