Family

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Losing a parent to death or to divorce is catastrophic for any child. There are different issues in the grief process between the death of a parent and death of your parent’s marriage. When a child loses a parent due to death even young children can understand the concept that the body quit working. They all come across toys or things that break and quit working. Most have experienced the death of a pet, a goldfish or an insect they have found. While I’m not comparing the death of a goldfish to the loss and the grief involved in the ...

Divorce conflicts between parents can get ugly. And too often parents tend to vent or share this anger about the other parent with one or more of the children involved. The results can be devastating – not only for the “target” parent, but for the children, as well. This is just one form of parental alienation which is a serious and very complex set of behaviors which often feel justified by the alienating parent. The problem is that children get caught in the middle, are often confused about being told disrespectful things about their other parent and can learn to ...

Editor's Note: Several weeks ago, we shared with you the story of Kelley Rose Waller, a Foster mom and contributor to Hope 4 Hurting Kids in an article titled The Winding Road of Foster Care and Adoption as Kelley and her family prepared for and attended what they hoped would be the final court date for their foster son of the last two years whom they'd like to adopt. This past week, Kelley wrote the next installment in that story which we share with you now.  We have presented excerpts from each of Kelley's three articles below and encourage you to click-through to her ...

Here at Hope 4 Hurting Kids, we strive to resource individuals who work with kids to help the hurting children in their lives. Those adults include parents, grandparent, other relatives, teachers, coaches and many others who have the ability to influence the course of a child's life. Another important group are the dedicated men and women who work with kids week in and week out at churches all over the world. Sunday Morning Strategies is a series for those children's pastors and children's ministry workers to help equip them to serve children from disrupted families more effectively. It’s easy to talk ...

In the article “Leading and Managing Kidmin Change,” Greg Baird wrote: Fear - people are naturally afraid of change. Change is unknown, and we're usually afraid of the unknown. The reason this caught my attention is because it opened a door in my mind about why children's ministers might be reluctant to want to minister to children of divorce. It is a change from the “normal” kids that usually come to our churches. It makes sense that fear of the unknown, aka divorce, logical. Some of these fears might include, Divorcing families are messy. Supporting divorce goes against my moral ...

Our view of, and relationship with our earthly fathers has a lasting impact on our view and ability to relate to our Heavenly Father. This is especially true for children of divorce and children who have been abandoned by their fathers. God the Father The father image of God is pervasive in scripture. Indeed, the Holy Trinity consists of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Bible refers to God as Father over 250 times (primarily in the New Testament). The image of God as a personal father to those who put their faith in ...

I recently received correspondence from a young woman who is going through a divorce. She has young children aged three and five. The five-year old in particular is having issues with the divorce but burying her feelings deep inside. This article is adapted from my reply to her on how to help preschool aged children adapt to and deal with the divorce of their parents. Introduction Divorce is a traumatic event, and in so many of the cases, the parents get so caught up in their own struggles and circumstances that they don’t pay attention to (or even realize) what ...

You know how in Terminator 2, Sarah Connor knows the truth about Skynet and the future and Judgment Day and death and approaching mayhem and no one believes her?  She knows what’s coming, and she’s right.  So she fights for what she believes and is “rewarded” by losing custody of her son and being institutionalized. Granted, this gives us one of the awesomest girl-power scenes of all time (pull-ups on the side of your bed in a State Hospital is about as tough as you can get).   But I sometimes feel for Sarah Connor as a foster parent. Walk with ...