Thanks for listening to my Call of the Day podcast. You can hear my live radio program Monday through Friday from 2 to 5 p.m. Eastern Time on Sirius XM Triumph 11.

Robert, welcome to the program.

How's going, Dr. Laura?

Good. What can I help you with?

So I've got a 15-year-old freshman in high school.

He has always been a pretty decent kid, not always the best student.

This last week we had parent-teacher conferences and come to find out he's failing three classes due to missing assignments.

When we spoke with him about it, he had kind of a rough early spring, January. We missed some days of school for hockey.

And then he missed a couple of other days here and there.

He just never caught up.

And so we're in the process of catching notes.

Today, however, he was caught at school with a vape pen, which is very concerning.

And I'm trying to gather myself when I approach him.

I want to know he has things that he does that he loves. Like his love in life is fishing, being outdoors, and then like he shoots archery

competitively like two nights a week.

And I don't know, like I'm struggling with taking those as punishment from him or do we

go ahead and do that? Because in some ways,

I think those are the good positive outlets. I'm afraid that if we take away those things,

they'd be there. And so I'm just trying to get a plan together for how we address and move forward.

You know how my father made sure I never went on drugs when I was going off to college,

the State University of New York

at Stony Brook, which became kind of the Berkeley of the East. And I woke up one morning to black-helmeted

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