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?

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In this TED talk from Kelly McGonigal asks whether it is stress itself or how we think about stress that is harmful to our bodies. As you listen to this informative TED talk, think about how you talk about stress with the kids in your life. How they approach the stress in their lives can have a serious impact on how they deal with it.

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

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.

If the primary parent has to move to a smaller place or an apartment, the family pet may not be allowed. Even if it is a co-parenting situation, then a child may have to leave their pet behind on the week they go to live with the other parent.

Children get attached to their pets and kids of divorce get even more attached when they experience the break up of their family. I’ve had kids tell me their pet becomes their constant companion. They will talk to their pet and share their deepest thoughts with their pet. They also like talking about their pets. I’ve even had kids request prayer for their pets.

Most of us when we think about pets think about a dog, cat, bunny or maybe a caged bird. When children of divorce have to give up their primary pet, many will settle for some type of critter, like a guinea pig, hamster or some other small critter. These critters become just as important to them as a dog or cat. The smaller critters are small enough that they can travel back and forth between homes.

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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:

• Joy
• Surprise
• Fear
• Sadness
• Disgust
• Anger

For $0.99, kids (or anyone for that matter) can have endless fun exploring what emotions looks like and at the same time gaining more insight into their own emotions. Find it on the Apple App Store or visit the Grimace Home Page to find out more about the app and the project that led to it.

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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.

As those who work with kids on a regular basis, we need to be in a position to react to, and deal with, those circumstances that are likely to occur in the lives of some of the kids in your ministry. As I thought back on some of my most uncomfortable moments I’ve experienced personally in children’s ministry, I realized that they were uncomfortable primarily because I was unprepared for the situations to come up. Given the circumstances involved (one was a child who had a grandparent die, and the other was when a child told me they had spent the day before helping Dad to move out of the house), I should have been better prepared. Since then, the same or similar circumstances have presented themselves multiple times. The only difference was that I was better prepared for the conversation. They are never easy conversations, but they can be made less uncomfortable with adequate training.

As leaders in children’s ministry, it is our responsibility to make sure that our volunteers are not caught off guard by these conversations and that they are equipped to speak into these kids lives no matter what circumstances they may find themselves in. Particularly in a large group/small group format where the small group leaders consistently speaks into the lives of the kids in their group, they need to understand and appreciate what the child of divorce and child from a single-parent home is going through.

Here are some ideas for how to train your volunteers to help them to minister to children of divorce and children from single-parent homes:

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We are excited to announce the release of Draw Your Emotions. Draw Your Emotions is a brand new workbook designed to help young people identify their feelings. A fundamental part of emotional regulation is being able to recognize, name and understand the emotions going on inside of us.

In the tradition of our most popular resource, My Feelings Workbook, Draw Your Emotions encourages the reader to use the gingerbread man figure to draw how a variety of emotions affects their body. The reader explores where in their body they feel the particular emotion and what it feels like. The user is encouraged to explore the various ways and places a particular emotion affects them. The goal of this resource is to help people recognize when, where and how they feel particular emotions so that they will be better able to regulate their feelings.

This workbook includes pages for: Continue reading

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 jo@samaritans.org. Sometimes it helps just to write out what you’re feeling, and someone will respond.

Editor’s Note: Cindi is very open and honest in what follows about her own journey and speaks openly about suicide and attempts at suicide. While we commend her on her transparency and the associated message of hope, we also recognize that such a message can be difficult for some people to read. If you are one of those people, I encourage you to skip to the last paragraph and check out our Suicide Help Center for more information and helpful resources on the issue of suicide.

In the past, I have rarely ever mentioned the topic of suicide. The mere mention of the word would make my heart feel like it was going to beat out of my chest. Today, I choose to talk about suicide freely.

The Plague of Suicide

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Since the 1970s, millions of children have been caught in the middle of the divorce wars. After the then Governor Ronald Reagan signed the No Fault Divorce decree divorce in 1969 divorce has been rampant. Most recently the divorce rate has slowed down but that might be because the co-habitation rate is up.

Adult children of divorce, you know those kids whose parents divorced back in the 70s and 80s, will tell you they don’t trust marriage so they choose to cohabitate. The problem with cohabitation is the children still suffer because most cohabitation situations eventually break up. And to the child it is still the death of the once intact relationship of their parents. Makes no difference to a child if it is called divorce or break up – it still hurts.

It is no wonder in Malachi 2:16 that God says He hates divorce. The heavenly Father knew what divorce would do to people.

• He knew that the act of divorce could be passed down through generations. Adult children of divorce are more likely to divorce than adult children from two-parent families.
• He knew that divorce is the death of a once intact family and that there would be grieving that accompanies this death. Children grieve, parents grieve, grandparents grieve, friends grieve and God grieves.
• God knew the children would hurt and they would hurt for a lifetime.
• Malachi 2:15 tells us that God “made them one” and that He did this because “he was seeking godly off spring.” Most divorcing families drop out of church after the divorce. The children are not given a chance to become “godly offspring”.

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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.”

You’ve got to love forms, right? Whether you collect information in a computer database or still use a paper based system, most churches collect some sort of information about the kids that come through their doors and their families. Given that roughly 40% of children do not live with their married biological parents, it is important to consider whether or not your forms reflect the changing shape of American families.

How would a family that was cohabiting fill out your intake forms? What about a divorced family where the child splits time between two houses? What about a single-mother and her kids? How would grandparents who are living with their grandchildren fill out your forms? Do you know which kids in your ministry come from non-traditional family forms? Do you have a systematic way of sharing this information in a confidential way with the children’s teachers and/or small group leaders?

Take some time this week to sit down with the forms you use for your children’s ministry and consider how they might need to be revised to be more accommodating to kids from divorced and single-parent homes. Here are some suggestions on things to consider: Continue reading

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.

While moving through divorce can seem like an insurmountable obstacle, for many parents it is just the beginning of a new and equally intimidating challenge — co-parenting your children. Hats off to all of you who have chosen to remain in your children’s lives as co-parents. It means both of you care deeply about your children and want to continue raising them in the least-disruptive possible manner.

Of course not all parents can share the parenting process in this way and for some couples it is not the ideal situation to even attempt it. But those couples who are determined to co-parent and choose to live relatively close to one another so as not to disturb the school, sports and other related schedules of their children, certainly deserve credit and acknowledgement.

This is a complex topic that can’t be glossed over with a few simple how-tos. It is based on sincere levels of communication and a sense of trust between the former spouses. When handled with care, your children enjoy the security and comfort of being with their other parent when they are not with you. You are less dependent on strangers as caretakers in their lives, and that is a win-win all around.

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