When Kids Hurt: Parenting Class for Moms at WHCC

One of the "assignments" I'm most excited about this semester at Walnut Hill is a parenting class our team is helping to teach for the morning women's ministry, AM/FM.

Maybe it seems a little presumptuous for a 25-year-old single girl with no kids to teach a class on parenting teenagers, but I've always felt that my family's story lent itself to interacting with students AND parents. So I'm super-excited that I get to teach the week on families! And since I'm the resident "party girl" on our staff youth team, I get to teach on teen partying one week, too.
The class facilitators collaborated with our crew to choose the book: When Kids Hurt: Help for Adults Navigating the Adolescent Maze. It's a paired-down version of an earlier, more textbookish title by Chap Clark that addresses the issue of teenage abandonment and how it affects every area of a student's life. The idea is that we adults who care about adolescents (parents, youth workers, teachers, etc.) need to boldly step into a teenager's world and reverse the systemic abandonment he or she feels. It's a tall order, but one our team wholeheartedly believes in.

I commend the book--and the class (if you're a mom here in CT)--to you. We've given a copy to each one of our Walnut Hill Youth (WHY) Ministries leaders to read in the coming months, so I'm excited to see how this line of thinking will impact our ministry!