Part of the issue with advocating for the children of divorce in this country is that divorce is largely viewed from the wrong perspective.  As adults, we have a tendency to view the act of divorce from the perspective of the parents.  To truly effectuate change in the way the children of divorce are ministered too, we need to begin to look at divorce through their eyes.

Allow me to explain.  When parents get divorced, they tend to see the event from their own perspective.  From their point of view, the divorce may be welcome relief or even a tragic occurrence, but eventually the parents “get over it” and move on with their lives.  For children, divorce is not merely an event that happens in their childhood, but a trigger that changes the course of their entire lives.

In the book Between Two Worlds, Elizabeth Marquardt writes:

For too long, the debate about divorce in this country has been dominated by the adult perspective on divorce, with some adults charging that divorce is unjustifiably rampant and others retorting that divorce is a right that no one can question.

Continue reading

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

When people get divorced, relationships suffer.  Obviously, your parents’ relationship is different, but it can also hurt your relationship with one or both parents.  In some extreme circumstances, a parent may decide they don’t really want anything to do with you anymore.  They can do this by their actions (spending little time with you) or come right out and say it.  The relationship suffers or dies because one of your parents isn’t interested in investing the time in having a relationship with you.  This is unfortunate (tragic even), and you don’t deserve it, but if you do find yourself with a parent who doesn’t really seem to want to spend any time with you, you have to tackle that issue before we discuss ways of staying in touch.

You can’t make your parent want to spend the time with you that you might want to spend with them.  Should they want to spend time with you?  Yes.  Is it unfair that they are no longer acting like a parent? Yes.  Is it your fault that they don’t want to spend time with you? Absolutely not!  Here are some things you need to remember and try if you find yourself with a parent who “just doesn’t have time for you:”

1. Be realistic. Is it true that they aren’t spending any time with you, or is it just the case that they aren’t spending as much time with you as you would like.  Many times after a divorce, schedules get hectic and parents end up working longer hours and running around more. The lack of time may be the result of that, and they may be missing spending time with you as much as you are missing spending it with them.  In that case, hang in there. Explain to them that you miss spending time with them and wait for this season to pass.  Try not to let the current distance harm your future relationship.
2. Don’t blame yourself.  You can’t change your parents.  You didn’t make them the way they are, and you can’t make them switch.  You can ask, but you can’t snap your fingers and make it happen.  Understand that their decision not to spend more time with you is exactly that – THEIR DECISION.  It is not a reflection on you as a person or as a son or daughter. Do not take the blame for someone else’s decision.
3. Accept the fact that you can’t make your parent(s) change.  Your Mom or Dad may never be the kind of Mom or Dad you want or feel like you deserve.  You might never have the relationship with your parent that you feel like you should have. This isn’t as easy as it might sound, but once you finally accept this as true, you can spend your time trying to forge whatever kind of relationship you can based on who your parent is rather than who you want them to be. It also allows you to move yourself from being captive to an ideal to free to go on and become the person you want to be (something you do have some control over).
4. Talk to your parent.  What seems very obvious to you (that they aren’t spending enough time with you) might not even be on their radar.  What’s the worse that can happen – they could confirm what you already believe (that they don’t want to spend time with you). That will hurt, but at least it will be out there on the table!
5. Give it time.  Just because your parent doesn’t seem interested today doesn’t mean that it will never change.  Hopefully they will come to their senses and want to reverse the current trend. They may even come to the realization that they have hurt you and work to make up for that. You can’t make it happen (see #3 above) and you need to accept the current state of things, but that doesn’t mean that you have to abandon all hope.  People change.  Sometimes it is for the worse, but many times it is for the better.
6. Find a trusted adult you can talk to. You won’t be able to replace your “missing” parent, and you shouldn’t try, but it’s important that you have adults in your life that you trust who can help you with things that your distant parent should be doing.  It might be an aunt or an uncle, a family friends or someone from your church, but on the lookout for someone you can talk to and learn from.

Continue reading

We write a lot on Hope 4 Hurting Kids about how to how to help kids understand emotions like anger and different coping mechanism for dealing with anger. This short video from Life Noggin will help you to understand the science of anger and what happens inside your body and your brain when you’re starting to feel angry.

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

September is National Suicide Prevention Month. Last week, we received the following e-mail:

With September being ‘Suicide Awareness Month’, I have been putting together a list of resources to share with our after school program. One of my helpers found this guide:

Healthy Mind and Healthy Body: Suicide Prevention Guide

www.whitesandstreatment.com/healthy-mind-healthy-body-suicide-prevention-guide/

Would you mind including it on your page? My helper’s name is Kristin, if you would like to add that. She’s 11, and I thought it was a great find for her!

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. Today, we start to tackle one of the most visible issues you will likely face in your ministry – discipline and the child of divorce.

• Children of divorce live in a world where they feel like they have no control over anything. Oftentimes, that leads to them acting out or lashing out in their behavior. They misbehave as a means of getting attention and as a way of exerting the little bit of control they do have left over their lives. You have likely seen these discipline problems in your ministry and dealt with these kids, yet you may never have realized that the root of these problems was in dealing with family disruption. In the coming weeks, we will look at specific things you can do and techniques you can use in terms of discipline and children of divorce, but before we do that, it’s important to step back and take a broader view of the issue of discipline and children of divorce.

What Is Discipline?

At its root, discipline has to be about discipleship. It’s right there in the root of the word. We when we talk about any discipline, whether for the child of divorce or otherwise, it is important to keep the goal in mind. The goal must be to disciple the child – to guide them and teach them to make right and God honoring choices. Discipleship, and therefore discipline, has to be about the heart of the child. As such, the ability to discipline boils down to relationship. Continue reading

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

If your parents are divorced, you’ve probably heard them talking about child support, but what is it really? What is child support? What is it for? How does it work? Who is supposed to get it? The purpose of this article is to clear up any questions you might have about child support.

What is child support?

The dictionary defines child support as:

Money paid for the care of one’s minor child, especially payments to a divorced spouse or a guardian under a decree of divorce.

Continue reading

As this post is published, Hurricane Harvey is still battering parts of Texas and Louisiana in the United States with rain and flooding. As the storm eventually passes and the flooding recedes, families will be able to get back to their homes. They will, no doubt face devastation, loss and week or months of rebuilding. For many of the kids involved, this may well be the most traumatic thing they have ever experienced. For many it will become a permanent marker in their lives from which they will date things, as in “Remember before the flood…” or “that was after the hurricane.” If the effects of this trauma are not dealt with proactively in these kids, they will left to fester and likely show themselves in far more serious ways.

Fortunately, the fine people at the Mentor Research Institute have developed a resource called “The Great Storm and Flood Recovery: Children’s Story and Activity Book.”

This workbook encourages the child to fill in the blanks to explore their own experiences as well as color the pictures provide. It talks about the storm that caused the flooding, having to evacuate, cleaning up, rebuilding as well as the emotional impacts of the flooding. At all points, it gives the child a chance to reflect on their own experience.

A parent guide is included at the back of the workbook that covers: Continue reading

The Grief Maze is a useful for tool for helping kids, and adults, to understand the grief process with all of its twists and turns. Here is what the text says on the Grief Maze handout:

Grief is a lot like a maze. Sometimes you move forward. Other times, like your grief journey, you will run into obstacles and road blocks. Sometime you have to go backwards to go around a wall, and sometimes you have to retrace your steps. The important thing though, both in a maze and in grief, is that you continue to move forward and eventually you will reach your goal! As you complete this maze, think about your own grief journey and the obstacles you have faced along the way. What inspired you to continue moving forward?

You can give a grieving child a copy of the Grief Maze to work through on their own or work through it with them and use the opportunity to talk about the child’s grief. You can download a pdf copy of the Grief Maze by clicking on the image above or by clicking here.

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. The world of a child of divorced or separated parents is marked by chaos. Chances are that your Sunday morning children’s ministry may also include just a touch of controlled chaos. When those two worlds meet, it is easy to lose track of kids.

So, what processes do you have in place to follow-up on kids who are no longer coming to your church? Do you know which kids have recently experienced a family transition so you can make sure to follow-up on them? Are you small group leaders equipped and empowered to follow-up on the kids in their group who stop coming to church? Statistics show that children from non-intact families are more likely than their counterparts from intact families to stop going to church following the family transition, and you need to have a means of makings sure that these kids do not fall through the cracks.

In our culture, it is no longer unusual for a child to miss a week or more of church each month. But, if I child stops coming altogether, it is critical that you follow-up with the child and with the family. This is especially important as children transfer between age groups and between small group leaders when it is especially easy for them to get “lost in the shuffle.”

Here are some steps you can take at your church to help make sure kids don’t fall through the cracks and you are following up on missing kids: Continue reading

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

Divorce is hard, and many times when parents get divorced the last thing they want to do is talk to the other spouse. When there are kids involved though, that isn’t an option. Even so, sometimes the anger and the hurt and the emotions are so overwhelming that even parents refuse to talk to one another. Maybe every conversation turns into a fight, or maybe they just can’t stand to be in the room with the other person. Whatever the reason, when parents refuse to talk it is generally the kids who get hurt the most. So, what can you do if your parents refuse to even talk to one another?

What you SHOULDN’T do if your parents aren’t talking

One of the most important things you should do is know those thing you shouldn’t have to do if your parents aren’t speaking:

1. Don’t be their messenger. You are their child not a delivery service and not a messenger service. If your parents refuse to talk to one another and ask you to deliver messages, politely and respectfully explain that you would rather not do that because it makes you uncomfortable, and ask them to find some other way to communicate with one another (see suggestions below).
2. Don’t take sides. Your parents won’t always make the best choices, and when they are angry or fighting, they may be tempted to try to sway you to “take their side” against the other parent. The fact of the matter is, you are free to love both of your parents, and they should respect that decision.
3. Don’t try to play counselor. If your parents need to find someone to help them get along better, they need to find an adult who is removed from the situation. That’s not your job, nor should you try to fill that role.
4. Don’t use it to your advantage. You may be tempted to use the fact that your parents aren’t talking to get your own way or to get one parent to agree to things the other has already said no too. This isn’t fair to your parents, and it will likely come back to haunt you.
5. Don’t take it personally. Even if your parents are fighting about things related to you (visitation, child support, etc.), it is not your fault that they are fighting. Don’t feel guilty about it.

Continue reading