Children and teens live in an ever-changing world that throws more and more at them and prepares them less and less to deal with the direct impacts, the collateral damage and the emotions that follow. At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, our goal is to help these hurting children and teens move from hurt to hope and healing.

Today we announce a three stage plan to help young people understand, deal with and overcome the difficult emotional circumstances of their lives. We’re calling it:

JUMP In! STAND Strong! RISE Up!

We contemplated other names for this strategy like “Recognize, Survive and Thrive” and “Know It, Own It and Grow From It”; but in the end we settled on “Jump In! Stand Strong! Rise Up!” as a visual picture of the three stages of dealing with difficult and unpleasant emotions. Let’s have a closer look at each stage. Continue reading

In the past, we have discussed the importance of helping young people to name and understand their emotions using the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique. We have also discussed the importance of helping them to build a tool box of coping skills by discussing Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff.

So, how do we know when these tools are working? That is why at Hope 4 Hurting Kids we’ve developed the

Grand Feelings Exit Plan

The Grand Feelings Exit Plan helps a young person to know the signs that they have truly dealt with and moved past a difficult emotion or circumstance. Like the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique and Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff, the Grand Feelings Exit Plan is a mnemonic to help young people, and the adults who care for them, to remember the four signs of emotional healing. Let’s have a look at each sign. Continue reading

The first step in helping kids (or anyone for that matter) to deal with and process the difficult emotions in their lives is to help them understand and name emotions. At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we use the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique for that. Once we have helped kids to understand their emotions, we need to provide them with means for dealing with those emotions.

The second step towards emotional maturity and healing is to develop a robust set of coping skills. Coping Skills are designed to help “take the edge” of emotions and assist us in dealing with them. Unfortunately, that moment when a young person is drowning in emotions is not the right time to start thinking about coping mechanisms. Instead, it is important that kids and teens have at their disposal a tool box full of coping mechanisms that work for them that they can draw from in a time of crisis.

At Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we’ve developed another mnemonic to help keep track of the many different types of coping mechanism. This time we borrowed from the title of a popular book series by Richard Carlson. The different types of coping skills can be readily recalled by remembering the phrase:

Please Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

Continue reading

Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Last week we started a series on issues related to dealing with parents and we identified three different types of divorced parents you are likely to deal with:

• The Warring Parents
• The Absent Parents
• The Other Parent

This week we continue our series by looking at the Absent Parents.

2. The Absent Parent

Continue reading

H4HK FAQs are designed to answer questions kids and teens ask when facing difficult situations and circumstances in their lives.

When it comes to step and blended families, this question gets asked a lot.  It is difficult living in the same house as someone you don’t really like. In order to answer this question though, we need to think about WHY you don’t like your stepparent.

In my experience, people who don’t like their stepparent fall into one of four categories:

#1: You don’t like your stepparent because they are a genuinely mean or unkind person. This is the category most kids who don’t like their stepparent would likely say they fall into, but in actuality it is the rarest of category and generally not the reason for the friction in the relationship. However, If this is genuinely the case (that your stepparent is mean or unkind), there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. Unfortunately, you can’t change people overnight. Instead, be respectful and aim for peaceful coexistence (meaning that you may not like him/her but you will at least choose to seek after peace rather than arguing or fighting). Remember that, as your stepmother or stepfather, this person is important to your biological parent even if he/she is not all that important to you. Remember to be respectful in your dealings with your stepparent even when it is hard.  Choose to be respectful because it is the right thing for you to do even if the other person doesn’t necessarily deserve it. Try your best to be loving and kind to them. You never know – you’re actions may impact how they choose to live their life and that act of love or kindness may come back to you and lead to a more healthy relationship.

With that out of the way, we can talk about the other, more likely, reasons that kids don’t get along with their stepparents. Even if you think you into the first group, you need to try to step back and evaluate the situation unemotionally to figure out if it is actually something else driving your dislike for your stepparent. This can be hard, and it might help to ask some people you trust (friends, aunts and uncles, grandparents, etc.) to be honest with you about why they think the conflict exists.

Continue reading

Feelings pong is a fun game to play and easy to set up – all you need is a table some cups and ping-pong ball. It is another great activity to use with the Super Simple Feelings Management Technique to help kids and teens to better understand and deal with the emotions they face.

Here’s what you need:

1. Plastic cups (9, 13, 18 or 24 cups work best for a pyramid). We used multi-colored cups so each color represented a group of emotions but that isn’t necessary for the game.
2. Ping-Pong balls.
3. Permanent Marker.

Here’s how it works. Continue reading

Many of the resources and articles you see here on Hope 4 Hurting Kids include ideas and activities for teaching kids to better understand and deal with the difficult emotions that they face in life. To accomplish that goal, we suggest five main strategies to help kids to better recognize, understand and process their emotions. These five skills are represented by the letters SSFMT and the mneumonic:

Super Simple Feelings Management Technique

Here what each letter represents:

S(uper) – See It

Continue reading

H4HK FAQs are designed to answer questions kids and teens ask when facing difficult situations and circumstances in their lives.

When your parents separate or divorce, it is a very hard time. However, sometimes it is even harder when your parents remarry.  The world of stepmothers, stepfathers, stepsiblings and half-siblings can be a tough road to navigate and raises a whole host of issues that you will be forced to deal with.  Many times, children and teens find that they don’t care for their parent(s) new partner, and the step-family dynamic becomes difficult if not impossible to deal with.

However, there are cases where kids and teens find they really get along with their parent’s new partner.  Generally, this should make the transition easier, but not always! Sometimes the other parent resents the new relationship you have formed with your other parent’s new wife/husband and holds it against you. Sometimes they will even tell you that you are betraying them by befriending their ex’s (your other parent’s) new spouse. This puts you in a terrible position, and unfortunately it happens more often than you might think.

So, what should you do if you like your parent’s new spouse and your mom/dad is making your life miserable because of it? Here are some ideas:

1. First, understand and accept that you have the right to love both of your parents and the right to get along with your parents’ new spouses if you choose to do that. Your parents should not put you in a position where you feel like you have to choose between one parent and the other or between one of your parents and another parent’s new spouse. It is possible to have relationships with all of them, and ultimately it is up to you parents to understand and accept this. That said, there are some steps you can take to help your parents see the situation more clearly and hopefully adjust to it better so that you are not caught in the middle.
2. Try to understand what your parent is going through. They should not be acting that way, and you don’t have to accept their behavior, but do your best to try to think about the situation from their perspective. If you can understand the pain and the hurt and the fear that they are feeling, you may be able to approach the situation in a more effective way. For example, if their dislike of your new relationship with the other step-parent is driven by fear that they may lose you, you can reassure them that just because you get along with your new step-mom (for example), that she will always be your mother and you don’t love her any less.
3. Have an honest an open conversation with the parent who is having trouble with your relationship with the new stepparent. Try to keep the conversation as unemotional as possible. If you can’t have the conversation without arguing and fighting, consider sending your parent an e-mail or a letter instead.  Explain to them that just because you have a new relationship with your stepparent does not mean that you are replacing them. Explain how they make you feel when they question your loyalty or put down your stepparent. Explain that your relationship with the stepparent is different than your relationship with them and the fact that you have a formed a good relationship with them has made your life better/easier after the divorce.
4. Keep the details to yourself. You should never feel like you have to keep secrets from either of your parents, but it is possible to hold back on sharing all of the details with a parent is struggling to accept your new relationship with your stepparent. If you had a great vacation with your dad and step-mom, by all means, tell your mom about your vacation, but don’t feel like you have to share about how you and your step-mom stayed up until 3:00 AM one morning just laughing and sharing stories.
5. Never ever compare your parent to your stepparent.  Comments like, “You’re not as nice as my new mom (step-mom)” cut like a knife and are just as cruel to your mom as her accusing you of being disloyal.
6. Give it time.  Just like it may have taken you time to finally forge a good relationship with your new stepparent, it may take your mom or dad time to get used to the idea of you having a new “parent figure” in your life.

Continue reading

Welcome back as we continue our “Sunday Morning Strategies” series designed to help you to accommodate children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. Last week we looked at specific legal issues you need to be aware of when it comes to divorce. Over the course of the next few weeks, we are going to look at parent issues that you need to be prepared to deal with if the kids in your ministry have parents who are separated or divorced.

In a more traditional children’s ministry setting, our interactions with parents are generally driven by the idea of equipping them to disciple their own children on a daily basis. The ultimate goal with divorced or separated parents, but the methods sometimes need to be a little different. In this series, we will look at three different “types” of divorced parents that you are likely to deal with in your ministry and how you as a children’s pastor and a church need to address them.

• The Warring Parents
• The Absent Parents
• The Other Parent

1. The Warring Parents

Continue reading

Over the course of the last decade or so, I have read quite a few books, and thousands of articles and studies, about divorce and the impact of divorce on kids. You don’t usually have to get past the first couple of paragraphs before you can figure out where the author stands on the question of “Does divorce harm kids?”

One of the raging debates for the last few decades in the circles of those who deal with children of divorce is whether the negative impacts experienced by so many children of divorce are related to the divorce itself or related to the circumstances surrounding the divorce. Much has been written about the issue, and frankly, for many, the argument itself seems to become more important than helping kids deal with the impacts themselves.

One camp argues that it is not the divorce itself which harms kids but the external factors surrounding the divorce that impact children negatively. It is as if to argue that there is nothing inherently wrong with divorce because, even if kids get hurt, it is because of the byproducts of that divorce rather than the divorce itself. This camp, I believe, downplays the impact of divorce on kids in an effort to give parents who have divorced, or are divorcing, a sense of hope. This side would argue it is not the divorce itself that matters but how you conduct yourself during the divorce. They want us to believe that “kids are resilient” and “when parents are happy, kids will be happy too.” This side of the debate has coined phrases such as the “good divorce” to describe a divorce where parents make an effort to get along “for the sake of the kids.” They write off the studies and evidence that contradict their position by pointing out that “not all kids are affected negatively” and that the “differences in impact are not all that severe.” This side of the argument would have us believe that most kids are totally over their parents’ divorce and have moved on with their lives within two years of the divorce. If a child falls outside that guideline, it is likely because the parents have not handled the divorce as well as they should or other external factors have precipitated a more adverse reaction. Opponents of this view argue that it marginalizes the impact of divorce on kids who are already the unwitting victims of a circumstance that they did not choose. Opponents also would argue that this view, contrary to the prevailing evidence, gives parents a false sense of hope in terms of how their kids will react to a divorce and thereby encourages parents to ignore the impact their decision will have on their kids.

The other camp holds that there are impacts on kids which are inherent in divorce and are not dependent on other external impacts. In other words, it is divorce itself that harms kids, and the external impacts of divorce only serve to deepen and prolong that level of harm. In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that I tend to find myself leaning much more in the direction of this camp based on the research I have reviewed to date. Proponents of this argument will tell you that divorce, even the so-called “good divorce,” has a negative and lasting impact on kids. Divorce, the act of a child’s parents deciding that they no longer want to be married fundamentally changes a child’s life, oftentimes leaving them questioning their very existence, and every time dealing with the fallout of the divorce for years and even decades to come.

Continue reading