My 16 year old son has a friend, and it's someone who he's been telling me about since the beginning of the school year. His friend is a girl, but they are just friends. They have gotten together to study and to prepare assignments for school, now that schools give out group assignments.

Yesterday, he told me that he may have to go see his friend because she had some problems and she needed a friend to talk to. After about an hour and a half, he called me to say that his friend was thrown out of her house and they didn't know what to do. I asked where they were and I went to pick them up. When we got home, she told me that her mom had thrown her out of the house and that she just didn't know what to do. My son had told me on the night of homecoming he had met the mom and that the mom had given him and his date a ride to his date's house, and that he had seen an open bottle of alcohol in the car. He said if he had known that she had been drinking, he never would have gotten in the car with her because that is what he has been taught.

After being at home for a while, her mother started sending text messages to my son about he shouldn't email her daughter because she had taken the computer away, and that he shouldn't call her because she had also taken her cell phone. My son's friend told me that she was afraid of her mom, but that she has not been physically abused.

After a long talk with both of them, I decided that I should call the mother to let her know where her daughter was, and to ask if she could just spend the night at my house, and that I could send her to school in the morning, and that she could be home after school the next day. The kids agreed with me, trusting me as the adult. When I called the mother, she told me how worried she was and began telling me that her daughter is a pathological liar and things of that nature, and then she told me that she had reported her as a runaway. She told me that she did not feel comfortable with her daughter spending the night at my house, and asked me to bring her home. I again talked to the kids, and explained that if she had been reported as a runaway, then we could be charged with harboring a runaway, which could cause problems for us. I told my son's friend that she could call me if she ever needed to talk, and she agreed to go home. When we got there, the mother seemed polite, but never said one word to her daughter, and started telling me things about her that I didn't feel I needed to know. I told her that I brought her daughter home as I thought this was best, and that I would appreciate it if she could allow my son to continue his friendship with her daughter. She then started talking to him and telling him things about her daughter that I felt he did not need to hear from her, so I said that I had kids at home waiting and we had to get back, and we left. I am feeling really uneasy about the whole situation because it didn't appear to me that this woman was at all worried about her daughter, and I don't want to think that she will abuse her daughter, but I did not get a good feeling about the mother, who seems to believe everthing that her 3 year old says about her big sister, and if my son's friend contradicts what the 3 year old says, the mother automatically labels her a liar. My questions is, what would you do in this situation, and should I have handled it differently. I really need to hear from you on this. Thanks for reading this and for being there to support me.