Newsletter

Strengthening Families is a strategic program that involves training several families together as they learn anger management, stress management, and communication and problem-solving skills.
These skills are practiced in a group setting and help encourage parents and teens to establish increased intimate communication within the family.

Director Dale MacGowan is very excited about the changes that have taken place in many of the program participants and reports, “The way in which the course is taught helps heighten closeness between family members.”

One mother shared that she would commonly just cry and didn’t know how to communicate well with her son. But during the group sessions she was able to receive words of appreciation from him and then share with him how they impacted her. Doing these exercises and communicating in such a warm, friendly way with her son was new territory for both of them.

All participants were asked to rate their happiness quotient on a scale of 1 to 10, and Dale observed that this mom’s demeanor seemed to have changed significantly since the first class.
He was surprised to see that she had started out as a 0 and had given herself a 5 by the end of the session. The following week she rated herself as a 5 and ended the session as an 8. The next session she started with an 8 and ended with a 9. By the final week she entered the room with a big smile on her face that validated her 9/10 self-evaluation.

Dale observed that this mother had made incredible progress and adds, “Over my 40-plus years with Advent I have found the most satisfaction from the Strengthening Families program because I have seen such dramatic changes in participants in relatively short periods of time.”