‘Courageous Parenting’ Will Be Topic Of Classes

As teens experiment with their growing independence, those years can be rocky for families. But a Christian class can help make that time more peaceful.

Spokane Youth for Christ is sponsoring two “Courageous Parenting” classes led by counselor Rick Kienholz.

The focus of the seminars, which begin this week, is to help parents develop a strategy for helping their child become responsible and self-disciplined, says Kienholz.

The focus on the class is not on how to change your kids; it’s how to change yourself and your parenting style. The class begins with teaching parents how to understand their child and helping parents examine their current parenting style and how to adapt it to fit their child’s needs.

Parents learn how to weather conflicts, how to respond effectively to rebellion, how their child makes decisions, and how to maximize their influence with their child.

“With really dysfunctional families and kids, it works great,” says Kienholz. “It really mends the family.”

Youth for Christ offered the class through the juvenile justice system in Spokane for seven years and saw some dramatic results.

“We’ve seen immediate change in some cases,” says Kienholz. “Most of the families who had changes in behaviors, those behaviors were long term.”

Kienholz cautions that for extremely troubled families, change does not come easily.

For example, says Kienholz, if a teen has learned that turning his anger toward his parents will get them to back off, he’ll often intensify his behavior when faced with a new attitude. But parents have to stick with it in order to see results.

“It’s going to get worse before it gets better, but it will get better,” says Kienholz. “Within a couple of weeks, you start to see movement.”

But the classes aren’t only for families dealing with troubled teens. It’s also helpful for the ordinary growing pains that adolescence brings.

“We were really struggling in communicating with our teen,” says Shirley Antak, who took the class with her husband, Ed, last winter. “We were just not on the same wavelength.”

Antak says she was focusing on what might happen to her daughter, now 17, and what she might do instead of having more confidence and trust in her.

“I was becoming a controlling parent, and I learned more about handling myself and my fear,” says Antak. “It’s a process of letting go and letting your child make their own decisions.”

Antak says she recommends the class highly to other parents.

“It has changed our total approach,” says Antak. “Our home is more a place of peace and joy and a sense of working together and love than it was before.”

Now they work through things as a family, says Antak, and she and her husband have more confidence in themselves and in their daughter.

“Courageous Parenting” will be offered at two churches.

A class at Heritage Congregational Church, 1801 E. 29th, begins Thursday and continues each Thursday through Oct. 9. To register, call the church at 624-5090. Deadline is Tuesday.

A class at Lidgerwood Evangelical Church, 228 E. Gordon, will begin Wednesday. To register, call 487-1408. Deadline is Monday.

Both classes are $10 per single or $15 per couple and will run from 6 to 8:30 p.m.