On this week's 'Parenting' segment on Moncrieff, one listener sought advice on their teenage son's behaviour.
Joanna Fortune, psychotherapist specialising in Child & Adult Psychotherapy, answers your parenting questions.
The question:
I am writing this shocked. My son, 14-years-old, snuck out of the house last week around midnight. He was caught.
He made up some silly story of what he was doing. He is really defensive and a bit cocky, to be honest. No remorse or sorry. Just making up lies after lies.
He is grounded and we took his phone to try to get some insight into what he was doing.
We have uncovered some shocking stuff. He and his mates are taking weed, I am not too sure about pills, picking mushrooms and talking about making some money from drugs.
He started mixing with a different crowd in school, and rather than stay in and play video games he always wants to be out with them.
I don’t know how to tackle this. Firstly, do I stop him from meeting his friends, contact the other parents all of which I want to do, but will that be enough?
I feel sick to my stomach. We live in a nice suburban part of Dublin and never saw this coming and am scared that he is mixing with the wrong friends and going down the wrong road.
What do I do in the short, medium and long-term?
Joanna's advice:
"The one thing that jumps out with this is the world 'shocked' - this is a parent understandably in shock.
"When you're in that state of shock it is not the time to respond to his behaviour, because you'll go into reaction mode.
"You're better off actually saying how you're feeling, saying 'This is shocking, I am shocked and I don't want to react to you in a state of shock - so I need time to think this through, and we're going to be sitting down with you in a couple of days or whenever we feel ready to talk this through with you'.
"So you're marking his card, but you're not getting pulled into that very emotive response".
'Layers of illegal things'
She said the parent needs to respond to what they found on their phone.
"Now you've uncovered layers of things on there and layers of illegal things - that does need to be said - on this phone.
"Just as there's layers to what's going on, there's layers to your response.
"Can you stop him from meeting his friends? I think you could say that, I don't think you're going to enforce that; he's already shown you he's sneaking out of your house at midnight."
'Collective response'
She said if these are school friends, there could be another way to tackle this.
"If you do know the parents of these other kids, I do think you have a duty to talk with those parents about what you've uncovered.
"Ideally you would have a group of parents who get on the same page, pretty much, and there's a collective response to this group of kids.
"You'll have timestamps on the messages they're sending; if those messages are being sent during school hours, there are grounds to involve the school.
"Otherwise - I'm just playing devil's advocate - the school may be saying 'This is happening outside of school and this is actually a parental issue'.
"Maybe the answer is a bit of both."
