Five Quotes About Friendship & Peer Pressure, brought to you by ARISE Life Skills

No man is an island—we are influenced heavily by the people in our lives. True friends, those that lift us up when life knocks us down, are rare and valuable things. Especially during the turmoil and confusion of adolescence, friends can mean the difference between failure and success. Succumbing to peer pressure and picking the wrong friends can destroy your future. How is someone a friend when they seek to see you fail? Real friends share in your triumphs as if they are their own.

1.  ”The only pressure I’m under is the pressure I’ve put on myself.” —Mark Messier
2. “True friends are like diamonds, precious and rare. False friends are like leaves, found everywhere.”  —proverb
3. “A true friend advises justly, assists readily, adventures boldly, takes all patiently, defends courageously and continues to be a friend unchangeably.”  —William Penn
4. “Anybody can sympathize with the sufferings of a friend but it requires a very fine nature; it requires, in fact, that nature of a true individualist with a friend’s success.”  —Oscar Wilde
5. “I can trust my friends. These people force me to examine, encourage me to grow.”  —Cher

Peer pressure and harmful friendships are often big factors in someone’s decision to stay in school or drop out.  For more information on resisting peer pressure and choosing the right friends, check out So You’re Thinking of Dropping Out of School, which will soon have a companion volume entitled “So You’re Thinking of Staying in School,” a valuable handbook for how to communicate effectively, build healthier, closer relationships, become a better listener and manage negative emotions. Dropping Out book one gives you the reasons why you should stay in school; book two gives you all the tools you need to follow through and get your diploma.

10 Tips for Teenage Parents, brought to you by ARISE Life Skills & Training, North Palm Beach, FL

Teenage parents have one foot in childhood and the other in adulthood. Being a parent at such a young age often leads to anger, stress and resentment. Educating yourself about parenting and learning all you can about how to be an effective mom or dad are the best things you can do to ensure that your child grows up happy, healthy and well-adjusted. Here are 10 simple things you can do to be a better teenage parent.

1. Realize that carefree days spent at the beach or the mall are over. Your child is your first priority, and child care is a full-time job.
2. Note that the period between conception and birth brings tough decisions, mixed emotions and a self-evaluation for the future.
3. Realize that your parents may be mourning the dreams they had for your future. Know that anger will pass, especially if you and your partner can prove that you can deal responsibly with the situation.
4. Sit down with a piece of paper and list your goals in life as well as your current resources. Identify the needs of a child and how your goals and resources will have to be adapted to meet them.
5. Be assured that no matter what others tell you, your life is not over; it is just taking a different direction.
6. Know that family stability is necessary for the growth and development of a child.
7. Budget your income before your child is born. Babies tend to be expensive, and the more savings you have in reserve, the better.
8. Realize that babies cry because it’s the only way they can communicate their feelings to you.
9. Be aware that statistics suggest that teenage parents are more likely than older parents to strike their children. They tend to have less experience with children, are less patient with their child’s development and have a strong belief in physical punishment.
10. Respond to the needs of your child. He wants, and often needs, his needs to be met NOW, no matter how exhausted you feel.

Teen Drivers: Rules of The Road by the ARISE Foundation can help you buy, maintain and safely operate a car.

Kyle Grayden, 17, of Shorewood, Minnesota, glanced at her iPod while driving with her cousin and a friend, both 17. When she veered off the road and flipped her car into a ditch, she and her friend were killed.

Heading home from practice, Jonathan Chapman, a 16-year-old high school basketball player from La Plata, Maryland, was reportedly speeding when his car rammed an SUV. He and three friends, ages 14 to 16, were killed.

Five days after graduating from high school, Bailey Goodman, 17, of Fairport, New York, and four classmates were on their way to her family’s cottage. Moments after text messages were exchanged on Bailey’s cell phone, she slammed into an oncoming truck. All five teens were killed.

These three tragic stories from Reader’s Digest (Aug. 2008) illustrate the need to educate teen drivers about safety behind the wheel. Car crashes are the number one killer of teens in the United States.

At the ARISE Foundation, protecting and nurturing teens is a big part of our life skills curricula. Rules of the Road is a manual just for teen drivers. This detailed, informative book covers all of the following and much more:

• Defensive Driving
• Road Rage
• Automobile Maintenance
• What to do if you are pulled over
• What to do if you have an accident
• Drunk Driving
• How to Insure a Car

…and more!

Most teens can’t WAIT to get their license…and most parents dread the day their child gets behind the wheel. Help ease the stress and educate teens on the huge responsibility of owning and operating a vehicle with the Rules of the Road book.

To order ARISE Rules of the Road or any of our other fantastic Life Skills books and materials, visit the ARISE website or call us at 1 (888) 680-6100.

Advice from Mom: 10 Pearls of Wisdom Brought to You by ARISE Life Skills

Being a mother is hard work. You dispense hard-learned advice just to have it ignored most of the time. Only once your children have grown, made their own mistakes and had their own triumphs, do they realize exactly how valuable your advice was.

These are 10 “pearls of wisdom” collected by the ARISE Foundation over their 20 years of life skills training. The contributors are of all different ages, races and socioeconomic levels. Everyone has one thing in common: they all learned something from their mothers. For more, please visit http://www.ariselife-skills.org