My mother died days after I turned six years old. For six years, my father raised myself and my three brothers by himself to fulfill a promise he had made to my mother. When I was twelve, my father remarried and we plunged head first into the world of step families. At the time, it all seemed so very normal to me at the same time all the while knowing that my family was different. There were some struggles and some hard times, but that’s family. That’s my story. We all have a story, and for those of us who did not grow up in “traditional families” often have stories marked by loss, pain and longing for something we felt like we should have had.  It’s not always all bad though.  Sometimes our stories are also marked by perseverance and overcoming.  We want to hear your stories.  More importantly, we want other people to hear your stories.
Do you fit into any of the following categories as a kid?
- Growing up or grew up without a father?
- Growing up or grew up without a mother?
- Live or lived in single-parent home?
- Live or lived in a step-family?
- Live or lived with unmarried cohabiting parent?
- Have gay parents?
- Have step or half siblings?
- Live or lived with your grandparents?
- Live or lived with an aunt, uncle or other relative?
- Live or lived with a friends’ family?
- Growing up or grew up in foster care?
- Growing up or grew up in some other environment other than with your natural married parents?
When a marriage breaks up and a divorce occurs children have to adjust to a lot of changes. Sometimes it means moving to another place to live or living in two homes. It also means many children have to give up a pet.
One of the best ways to help kids deal with difficult emotions when they come up is to prepare them for that time by building their emotional intelligence ahead of time. Grimace is an app designed for just that purpose. Grimace is the brain child of Oliver Spindler and Thomas Fadrus who set out to “find a non-verbal representation of emotions that can be integrated into interactive systems.” From a school research project to they developed an app that allows the users to visually see and put a face to various combinations of six basic emotions:
Welcome back to our series of “Sunday Morning Strategies” for accommodating children of divorce, children from single parent homes and children from other modern family types in your Sunday morning children’s ministry. In today’s installment, we’re going to talk about the absolute necessity of training your volunteers so they will be prepared to deal with these kids.
If you’ve thought about suicide, or lost a loved one to suicide, you need to know that you’re not alone! If you currently feel hopeless, I urge you to call the suicide hotline at 1-800-273-8255, or you can send an anonymous email to 
Welcome back to our brand new series called “Sunday Morning Strategies” where we are examining things you can do in your Sunday morning children’s ministry programs to accommodate children of divorce and children from various types of modern families. There are certain things you can incorporate into your ministry to specifically address the issues and concerns of these children in your churches, and we will get to those later in this series. However, we’re going to start with some of the fundamentals underlying your ministry. Today, we are going to talk about forms and how some simple adaptations can help you to learn about the kids in your ministry who aren’t living in what we might call “traditional homes.”
Editor’s Note: Co-parenting is hard. If you have kids from divorced homes in your ministry (and you do), then you also have parents who may be struggling with the right way to co-parent those kids. As a children’s ministry, you need to be prepared to offer advice to those parents which is the purpose of this article from Rosalind Sedacca.