No teen deserves to feel alone.
We connect every teenager with trusted adults and resources because no teen deserves to feel alone.
What makes a caring adult a trusted resource? When you complete our easy, online certification, you will leave with the skills and knowledge to connect with teens and help them walk through life’s challenges. You will be fully equipped to lead a Support Group!
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Students helped since 2008
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“One thing I learned from this group is that I always have someone to talk to.”
– Teen Life support group student
I can’t say enough about the benefit with partnering with Teen Life.
The past eight years, I have led or co-led at least one group every year, sometimes two. The curriculum is pertinent and helpful to get kids to talk and engage. Kids need a safe place to be encouraged and to gain skills in coping with school pressures and life stresses.
Heritage MS Counselor
Grapevine/Colleyville ISD
It has been a great blessing to walk beside these kids on their turf.
Equipping them with some tools to help break the generational cycles of self-esteem, relationship, and spiritual poverty, and to assist them in casting a vision on where they want to be and how they might get there.
Jacob
Decatur ISD, Support Groups Facilitator
You’ve got to check this out!
The Power of Your Words
The power of your words is often overlooked. However, it is crucial to speak positively about the teenagers in your life- for yourself, for them and for everyone else.
Motivation Monday: Searching for Hope
As we continue to share stories from our Teen Lifeline Support Groups, we hope that you are seeing the benefits that these groups bring to the students, school districts, campus counselors and the facilitators that lead these groups.
We are so passionate about our #TL5K is because the funds raised by this one event help make these groups possible! We have the opportunity to continue to grow and reach teenagers with 100 volunteer facilitators trained to use our Life Lived Better Curriculum to lead support groups in their local school or church.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Teen
I have worked with teenagers now for over a decade. In that time, there have been significant changes in environment, social interaction, and educational expectations, but one thing has remained. Teenagers generally don’t feel they can talk to their parents.
I’m coming from a place where I sit in groups with teenagers who are strangers to me and within 30 minutes of talking to them can get them to share who the most important person in their life is and why. I’m writing this not as the parent of a teen but as someone who works with teens, so this is also for any youth worker that wants their conversation to get better. I’m hopeful that this helps you, and I’m also hopeful it helps me as I start to create an environment for conversation with my elementary school kids that will carry into their teen years – because we all know if I wait, it’ll only get harder.
Motivation Monday: Open Doors
Teen Lifeline was able to reach 837 teenagers in 2015 – our biggest year yet! What is even better about this number is that it happened because of our awesome volunteers who take time out of their week to facilitate support groups with students.
Jacob Baker, Youth and Family Minister at Decatur Church of Christ, is one of these facilitators and our guest blogger for Motivation Monday, part 2. We love hearing stories from our facilitators – about the students they reach, conversations they have and doors that are opened through these groups. As you’ll see from Jacob’s experience, support groups can open doors for relationships both with the school administration and students.
Helping Students Find Hope in Hopelessness
A few weeks back, I was sitting with some students from a really tough part of our city and working through some of their resources. Part of our groups involve identifying and building up the student’s sense of courage, connectedness, self worth, and capability. What we noticed with this group is a general lack of self-reported capability. This seemed to be the trend throughout the group of young men.
This was a strange happening in my experience. Generally, a group of young men will tend to overstate their courage and capability from a place of machismo or even lack of self-esteem. It’s a coping mechanism everyone uses from time to time to protect us from being real with each other.
Motivation Monday: A Lesson in Empathy
We are less than 9 weeks away from our 7th annual #TL5K! In order to celebrate our biggest fundraiser of the year and bring awareness to what actually happens through Teen Lifeline Support Groups, we are going to release a bonus blog once a week until our 5K on April 2nd! These blogs will be a small glimpse into the stories of teenagers we work with and some of the facilitators who make these groups possible.
We are passionate about these groups because we get to see the faces, hear the stories and speak truth every single week. If you are just now getting introduced to Teen Lifeline or are wanting to know more about how we are helping teenagers live life better, these stories over the next 9 weeks are going to be a great way to take a behind-the-scenes peek at our non-profit.