Catalyst

Informed Families Catalyst

Parenting in 2025: New Challenges, New Solutions for Raising Healthy Teens

Posted by Informed Families on May 26, 2025 at 10:03 AM

Staying Ahead While Staying Connected...Raising teens has never been easy—but parenting in 2025 comes with a unique set of challenges that didn’t exist a generation ago. Social media trends shift by the hour, vaping continues to evolve under the radar, and artificial intelligence now plays a growing role in how kids learn, communicate, and even think.

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Topics: parenting, positive parenting, Informed Families, social media, drug trend, parents

Honoring Heroes: How Military Families Build Strength and Prevention at Home

Posted by Informed Families on May 21, 2025 at 4:57 PM

As Memorial Day approaches, we pause to honor the brave men and women who have served our country—and the families who stand beside them. Military families play a critical role in our nation’s strength. Their everyday lives are marked by discipline, sacrifice, and resilience. These values not only support their loved ones in uniform but also create strong, prevention-focused homes that we can all learn from.

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Topics: Informed Families, social media, drug trend

☀️ The Summer Prevention Plan: Keeping Kids Safe, Connected, and Substance-Free

Posted by Informed Families on May 16, 2025 at 1:49 PM

Summer is around the corner — and while it’s a time for fun and freedom, it can also bring new challenges for parents. With more free time and less structure, kids are at a higher risk of engaging in risky behaviors. That’s why Informed Families created a proactive Summer Prevention Plan to help families stay connected, engaged, and substance-free all season long. From fun activities to clear safety tips, we’ve got everything you need to make this summer safe and memorable.

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Topics: social media, drug trend, emojis

How to Help Your Child Succeed in Life

Posted by Informed Families on May 29, 2023 at 1:30 PM

When 13-year-old Dillon Reeves noticed his Michigan school bus driver’s head drop forward and her hands fall from the steering wheel, he raced to the front of the bus, turned the wheel to avoid hitting a car at the intersection, and hit the brakes.

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Topics: marijuana, brain development, social media, drugs, opioids, myths, fentanyl

Teens, Fentanyl, and Social Media—A Lethal Combination

Posted by Informed Families on May 20, 2023 at 4:36 PM

On Valentine’s Day, 2021, 19-year-old Logan Rachwal had an argument with his girlfriend and popped what he thought was Percocet, a painkiller that he bought on the social media app Snapchat. Logan fell asleep and never woke up.

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Topics: marijuana, brain development, social media, drugs, opioids, myths, fentanyl

The Right Way To Involve Your Child in Sports

Posted by Informed Families on December 22, 2022 at 5:32 PM

When famed soccer reporter Grant Wahl died suddenly during the World Cup earlier this month, his wife, physician Céline Gounder, told CBS News, “I want people to remember him as this kind, generous person.”

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Topics: parenting, teenagers, sports, teens, social media, Family Table Time

One Child’s Fentanyl Death

Posted by Informed Families on December 19, 2022 at 2:16 PM

“When you approach a dead body, there is a void there, and I’d never sensed that before, and that’s when my world was destroyed,” Air Force veteran and airline pilot Chris Didier told The Washington Post. His son seemed asleep at his desk.

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Topics: parenting, teenagers, teens, social media, fentanyl

Keep Your Kids From Taking Catfishers’ Bait

Posted by Informed Families on December 11, 2022 at 6:58 PM

The story was tragic. A former Virginia police officer drove nearly 3,000 miles to Riverside, California, to kidnap a teenage girl he had met online through “catfishing,” a type of online deception in which someone pretends to be someone else, especially to pursue fraudulent online romances.

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Topics: parenting, teenagers, teens, social media, valor

When Should You Give Your Child a Smartphone?

Posted by Informed Families on November 20, 2022 at 9:45 PM

“But Mom, everybody else has one!”

And of course, the classic parental response to this is, “If everyone else was jumping off the Empire State Building, does that mean you have to?”

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Topics: parenting, teenagers, teens, social media, smartphone

Snapchat’s Small Step Toward Helping Parents Monitor Teens Activity

Posted by Informed Families on November 13, 2022 at 4:47 PM

For years, parents have campaigned to get social media sites to help them keep their kids safe online. In order to stave off government action, some of these platforms have moved to offer safety features they say will help protect kids.

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Topics: parenting, teenagers, teens, social media

About Us

We teach people how to say no to drugs and how to make healthy choices. To reduce the demand for drugs, Informed Families has focused its efforts on educating and mobilizing the community, parents and young people in order to change attitudes. In this way we counteract the pressures in society that condone and promote drug and alcohol use and abuse. The organization educates thousands of families annually about how to stay drug and alcohol free through networking and a variety of programs and services .

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