ALC - Homeward

Two New Therapists to Join Homeward Bound in Helping Troubled Teens and Families

Remember the line from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.

Parents want their children to be successful and happy.  It’s universal. While many of us are intimately involved in directing our children’s academic or extracurricular lives, we can often feel inadequate or uncomfortable in advising them in their social/love lives.  That’s understandable, but not an excuse.

Twenty years ago, as a graduate student in Marriage and Family Therapy, I co-presented my first family seminar.  My target audience was what was referred to in the literature as “The Sandwich Generation.”  This four week class targeted people in their 40’s and 50’s who’s lives were being squeezed like a sandwich with the demands of raising children on one side, with the often competing needs of aging parents on the other.

At the time I launched Homeward Bound nine years ago, I was an idealist with a burning desire to significantly improve the long-term success of treatment by supporting teens and parents during the critical transition afterwards. Actually, the vision was even loftier than that. We wanted to eliminate recidivism in so far as humanly possible. Naïve? Probably. But was it worth attempting? Absolutely! So with that lofty goal we set sail with gusto on our adventure.