my family is really struggling I am a single mom with 2 kids 15 and 11?

It's important to let your children know you love them

Sounds like a tough situation, but there are many difficulties which can cloud our life vision.

Take stock of what you have, not of what is 'missing' or 'how things were', what you have now is simply what you have NOW.

Children look up to their parents - or those strong figures around them. Strength can be overt or subtle, but is always accompanied by respect.

Show you respect your childrens wisdom by allowing them to come up with ideas you can work on together. This will build a stronger bond and reinforce your confidence.

I think visiting a family therapist would be a hugely valuable investment, even if money is scarce.

I don't know what you mean by "have my 2 kids follow along with me".

Tell your kids that you would not give them expensive things even if you could, because you are unwilling to spoil them that way. It's called "spoiling" because it ruins kids' motivation and initiative to earn on their own. If other parents want to risk ruining their own children, that's their business but that does not obligate you to do the same.

Tell them that the parent's job is to give children what they need, not what they want. Kids need:

* Nutritious (not junk) food

* Functional clothing (used thrift shop clothing qualifies - anything better is a luxury, not a necessity)

* Drinking water

* Any shelter that protects them from the weather

* Leadership and guidance about what matters in life and what is worth spending their time and effort on

* Medical care, if needed

Your kids will be lucky to learn all of this, rather than to be spoiled.

Hopefully you will shower them with love, too.

Here is an example of what I meant when I referred to leadership and guidance just now:

Your kids' absolute top priority should be learning interpersonal communication skills. They will benefit from these when they are with friends, at school, at work, all the time.

As a nice bonus, this may reduce conflict and make for a happier home for all of you!

There are lots of self-help books about improving your interpersonal communication. Search "conversation", "interpersonal communication", "etiquette", and related subjects in your nearby libraries' catalogs. Or see what you can find at a book store. You could Google those topics, but you'll find that books are better written and more thorough than websites.

Read as many of those books as possible; each one will have different examples you will learn things from. Each contains the author's hard-won knowledge, the result of years of effort and sometimes suffering. Why learn the hard way what these authors have learned already? Why not just read the books?

Your older child can read those books too. The younger one should read them a few years from now.

Social skills are complex. They take a good deal of effort to learn well. The ridiculous thing is that they are never formally taught in the school system. If parents don't teach them, nobody will.

Entire books have been written about helping kids learn social skills. One good book I found is The Unwritten Rules of Friendship, by Elman (for parents of younger children). [http://amzn.com/0316917303]. I'm sure there are other books for parents like that.

But parents should not directly teach all social skills to kids, either. For one thing, kids often hate being lectured by their parents (because it feels like criticism?). Also, it would be far too time-consuming for the parent to say everything that needs to be said. And by lecturing at length, the parent would be modeling the behavior of a know-it-all; it's a bad idea to encourage that in teenagers, and anyway kids eventually figure out their parents don't know everything!

I think parents should arrange to have third parties teach their kids, as much as possible. Books are excellent third party resources.

When kids are older, they should be presented with more sophisticated books that they can read on their own. For example, there is "How to Win Friends and Influence People for Teen Girls" as well as the Dale Carnegie books that inspired it.