It's everyone's worst nightmare: Getting a call or finding out that someone you knew has completed suicide. People ask themselves, “Why?” They say things like, “I should have known. I wish I would have said something.”
“The greatest human need aside from food, water, and shelter is relationships.” - Justin Hacking, Clinical Supervisor at Idaho Youth Ranch.
Let’s face it - we need one another to survive. But this goes much deeper than the constructs of community and society. We need others in our lives who care about us, who listen, and who we know we can turn to when we need someone to lean on.
Parenting Skills & Childhood Development
One of the hardest things about parenting is knowing that you can’t protect your children from everything the world will throw at them. It is very easy to hope that if you don’t talk about the difficult things, they won’t happen.
We've all been there. You’re standing in the grocery store at the exact moment your child decides to have an emotional outburst because they're out of his favorite candy or she wants a particular type of cereal—or for no particular reason at all. We've all had those moments where our kids’ emotions become too much for us to handle and the embarrassment and frustration and overwhelming swell of our own emotions lead us to have rough days as parents.
The thing we hear most often from parents is, “I wish I would have known about you sooner.” It can be extraordinarily difficult for parents to reach out for help or to know what resources are available to them. It can also be difficult to distinguish between the signs of normal teenage moodiness and serious causes for concern.
Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT, is a form of therapy designed to help people struggling with behavioral challenges as a result of trauma. There are four primary goals of DBT that are proven to help young people rethink their behavior and manage stress.
Studies are only starting to show the dramatic increase of screen usage in the United States, as parents everywhere are struggling with balancing working at home with life at home.
Behind every Idaho Youth Ranch success story, there is a parent who found the courage to say they needed help. There are heart-broken mothers who sobbed with a complete stranger on the phone about how her baby was in trouble and she simply didn’t know what to do; and there are fathers thinking over every decision they’ve ever made and wondering where it all went wrong.