This great video from Learning Time Fun Jr. helps young kids (think toddlers through early elementary aged) to learn feelings and emotions by encouraging them to look at the characters’ faces and repeat the emotion.

This is an awesome tool to help younger kids begin to develop the emotions vocabulary that will serve them so well later in life if, and when, they face difficult circumstances.

For more awesome resources for learning about and dealing with emotions, please visit our Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotions Help Center.

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

It is very common for children whose parents have divorced to hope that their parents might get back together.  Most children of divorce experience this at some point following their parents’ separation.  This desire might last for a long time, and you may get angrier and angrier when it doesn’t happen.  Some kids even try to make deals with their parents or with God.  They might say,

God, if you let my parents get back together, I promise to keep my room clean and never to fight with my sister again.

Or, they might think to themselves,

If I just chip in more and do my chores, then my parents will see the improvement and want to live together again.

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We are excited to announce another new feature here on Hope 4 Hurting Kids called H4HK FAQs!

Our mission at Hope 4 Hurting Kids is:

…to help young people from diverse backgrounds, families, circumstances, and situations who are experiencing hurt, pain and adversity to find hope and healing.

In terms of the Hope 4 Hurting Kids website, we approach this from two distinct angles.

1. We provide information, resources, ideas and hopefully inspiration for people who work with kids. This includes parents, teachers, children’s ministers, coaches, grandparents, and anyone else interested in helping a child or teen who is hurting.
2. We provide vehicles and resources directly to hurting kids and teens. Features like Ask Us and our online Chat Rooms are examples of this approach, and the new H4HK FAQs series of posts is also intended directly for kids and teens who are seeking help.

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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. In this installment we are going to explore some of the legal issues related to a divorce or separation that you need to be aware of in terms of your children’s ministry and the safety of the children left in your care. This advice is given from the perspective of a children’s ministry worker and should not be construed as legal advice. You should check with your attorney or insurance carrier for specific advice or requirements for your church.

Custody Issues

The biggest legal concern you should have as someone entrusted by at least one parent with the care of their child(ren) is any custody issue that may arise out of the divorce or current requirements related to the child. The last thing you want to do is to be responsible for releasing a child to a parent who is not supposed to have custody of the child for some reason or another. Even if that parent is a member of your congregation, you have a responsibility to adhere to any court ordered or agreed visitation and custody schedule.

Make sure that you have a plan in place for who can pick up all of the children in your ministry, but this is particularly important in the case of a contentious custody battle. In our Divorce Ministry classes, we ask parents to let us know if someone other than they will be picking up the child, and we still require photo ID before we will release the child. I explain to all of the parents in orientation that I would rather annoy a grandma and grandpa than do anything to endanger the welfare of their child(ren). We also ask specifically if there is anyone who is not allowed to pick up the child. All volunteers should be made aware of this situation in order to avoid releasing the child to the “wrong” parent.

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Editor’s Note: In this article, Rosalind Sedacca addresses one of the questions we hear most often from parents – What do I do when the other parent treats the kids different than I do? Whether it is financial issues or concerns over discipline, you need to be prepared to answer these types of questions if you work with children from disrupted homes.

As a Divorce & Parenting Coach I continually get asked questions from concerned parents. One of the questions recently sent to me focused on an issue that many divorced parents face with mounting frustration. It had to do with this woman’s ex-husband treating the children to lavish gifts and trips when he has them, while Mom is struggling financially. She added that she is aware that she shouldn’t say anything negative to her children about her ex, but she was finding it difficult in the face of her circumstances. The question, of course, was what can she do about this?

It’s impossible to provide a specific answer when the so many of the circumstances are unknown in this situation. How often is Dad seeing the children? What kind of relationship does he have with them when he is not there? Is he angry about not sharing custody? Is he resentful towards Mom regarding other issues? Is he aware that she is struggling financially? Does he care? Is he trying to show her up and influence the children away from her? Or is he oblivious that his behavior is creating an issue for her? Is he aware that he may be spoiling the children? Does he think he’s being a wonderful Dad?

I’m sure you’ve thought of several other questions that are relevant to this situation. In so many cases there are no black and white answers to these types of problems – and certainly no simple solutions. It’s all about shades of grey, trying to find a common ground, a means of communicating your feelings and concerns in a way that doesn’t put the other person on the defensive, making them wrong and therefore no longer interested in a dialogue.

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This video from Sentis is part of a series of videos that explore how the brain works. This installment examines emotions and the brain in language that is very easy to understand.

For more awesome resources for learning about and dealing with emotions, please visit our Hope 4 Hurting Kids Emotions Help Center.

Have you heard about the new divorce phenomenon? It’s called the grey divorce, senior adults who are divorcing after years of marriage. You may wonder why I would bring up the grey divorce to children’s ministers. You are probably thinking,

“I deal with children, not senior adults.”

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The Feelings Parking Lot is a great tool to use with kids to both identify the feelings they are experiencing and to discuss different coping mechanisms that can help with those emotions. On top of that, it’s always fun to play with Matchbox Cars.

Here’s how to build it:

1. On a large piece of paper, poster board or foam board, draw a series of lines on either side to create “parking spaces.” Leave some space between the space for a driving area. Have fun decorating your parking area.
2. On one side of the parking lot, write the name of one emotion in each parking space. We also includes a simple emoji for each emotion to help younger kids who may not be able to read the emotion names (a list of the emotion names we used is included below, but you can use whatever emotions you want to include).
3. On the other side, write various coping mechanisms kids can use to deal with difficult emotions (again, the list of coping tools we used are listed below). Depending on how artistic you are, feel free to draw pictures representing the coping skill to help younger kids.

You can use the feelings parking lot one-on-one with an individual child, leave it out as an emotional “check in” for a group of kids at the beginning of a class or group with an adult to talk through the process, or just leave it out for the kids to explore and play with themselves.

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Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce and children from single parent homes in your Sunday morning children’s ministry or church service. The goal of this series is to equip you to better minister to the children in your church who come to you from non-traditional family structures. In a prior installment, we addressed the need to train volunteers to minister to children from divorced and single-parent homes and some strategies for undertaking that training.

However, just training the volunteers you already have may not be enough. You should also consider “targeted recruiting” to specifically find and recruit volunteers who will be able to relate to, and empathize with, children from divorced, separated and single-parent homes. By having some of these specialized volunteers spread throughout your ministry, you can help to ensure that a hurting a child has someone who can relate to them in their time of greatest need. These volunteers will bring a needed skill set and benefits to your ministry including:

• A unique ability to understand and appreciate the circumstances children of divorced and separated parents are experiencing.
• A sounding board for kids who are convinced that no one really knows that they are going through or cares.
• An innate ability to recognize when the underlying issue that is bothering a child has to do with their parents’ divorce or separation. Adults who experienced divorce as a child seem to have this sixth sense when it comes to understanding children who are currently going through it.

While it is possible to train your existing volunteers in these areas, finding people who already possess these gifts will help both you and the kids in your ministry. Here are some prime candidates who will bring a new perspective to your ministry and the ability to minister to children of divorce and children from single-parent homes: Continue reading

This miniature book about feelings for kids is called “My Book About Feelings” and comes to us from Scholastic.com.  That’s right, the people known for school book fairs and those book order forms that your kids bring home all the time also offers a series of mini printable books for kids.

This particular book gives young children (officially aged 3-5, but potentially slightly older kids too) an opportunity to write about their feelings.  At only 8 half-pages long, this rhyming book asks kids to write out what makes them happy, sad, scared, mad and glad. In addition, it asks children to record the best feeling they’ve ever had and one additional emotion of their choice.

This resource can be potentially very valuable for younger children experiencing intense emotions.  While it lacks a certain depth, any exercise which helps kids to identify their own emotions can have a healing (and often long-lasting) effect, and we would recommend this resource for younger children.

For a more extensive treatment of emotions and helping kids to recognize and deal with them, as well as a resource for older children, please see the resources we developed titled My Feelings Workbook and Draw Your Emotions.

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