JVK Parents Webinar

Back in March, shortly after we entered into quarantine because of coronavirus, Claire hosted her first webinar for the parents of JV Kids living across Central and Eastern Europe. The professor who was/is department chair for her major of children's ministry at Moody Bible Institute, Elizabeth Smith, was her guest.

Since then two more webinars have occurred, with one of those happening this evening!

Each webinar Elizabeth has focused on a different stage of development, and tonight was about school age kids. 

When parents registered for the webinar they were given the opportunity to ask a question of Elizabeth. She took time to gather the resources for answering those questions and based tonight's developmental webinar around those questions, such as "What is your belief about failure?"

Her answer? "For school age kids, don't protect them too much from failure. While failure doesn't feel good, you can't learn to persevere with it!" She talked about how she and her husband raised their kids with the saying, "It's not about perfection, but rather direction" and "Allow the journey to change you". What you want to teach your kids is reliance, which is learned by overcoming difficulty. 

She addressed the question of how to deal with peers and the drama that can come in relationships during the school age years. Oh she had so much good to share about this area! But one thing stood out was, "You want to teach your child to be friendly - that's being filled with the Spirit - but that they don't have to BE friends with everyone."

Many more nuggets of truth were shared during the hour-long webinar. What a blessing Elizabeth is to our JV community of parents as she shares her wisdom as an educator and a fellow parent!

Personally I'm so thankful for the impact that she had on Claire during her years as a student at Moody, and for how she helped prepare Claire for this role of caring for our JV Kids, and making resources like this available for their parents!