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TITLE: Dealing with Divorce SUBTITLE: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up (Leader’s Guide) AUTHOR: Elizabeth Oates PUBLISHER: Zondervan DATE OF PUBLICATION: January 6, 2009 RETAIL PRICE: $9.99 Paperback ISBN-10: 0310278872 ISBN-13: 978-0310278870 PAGES: 160 TITLE: Dealing with Divorce SUBTITLE: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up (Participant’s

Guide) AUTHOR: Elizabeth Oates PUBLISHER: Zondervan DATE OF PUBLICATION: January 6, 2009 RETAIL PRICE: $9.99 Paperback ISBN-10: 0310278864 ISBN-13: 978-0310278863 PAGES: 128


Sales copy / Longform copy for newsletters, email campaigns, blog posts, etc. Divorce stinks. No one knows that better than teenagers watching their parents split up. They wonder where God is amid the fray. They try to process their thoughts as they grieve the death of a dream, but they don’t know where to start. After the divorce teens are left dealing with a range of emotions: sadness, anger, worry, fear, confusion, and grief. They also experience a lot of changes, such as moving to a new house, a new city, and adjusting to new family dynamics and routines. Then they enter stepfamily territory. Combine that with losses already suffered, raging hormones, confusion, anger, and sometimes depression, and teenagers can turn into a bottle rocket ready to explode. Author Elizabeth Oates knows divorce all too well. While growing up, she experienced divorce at three different ages and stages of life. These experiences prompted her to write, Dealing with Divorce as a resource for teenagers and a tool to help them work through their thoughts and feelings. Elizabeth knows firsthand that no age is easier or more difficult than another when it comes to children coping with divorce. Each child experiences loss and pain in his or her own way. Yet, there is hope and a chance for healing when kids and teens address their thoughts, emotions, fears, and worries. Elizabeth is also the author of the book, If You Could See as Jesus Sees: Inspiration for a Life of Hope, Joy, and Purpose, and her third book, Mending Broken Branches, is due for release in October 2017. For more information on Elizabeth, to follow her blog, or to check out her speaking schedule, visit www.elizabethoates.com.

Shortform copy for blurbs Divorce stinks. No one knows that better than teenagers watching their parents split up. They wonder where God is amid the fray. They try to process their thoughts as they grieve the death of a dream, but they don’t know where to start. Elizabeth knows firsthand what teens are going through, as she experienced divorce at three different ages and stages while growing up. This led her to write, Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up as a resource for teenagers and a tool to help them work through their thoughts and feelings. Elizabeth is also the author of the book, If You Could See as Jesus Sees: Inspiration for a Life of Hope, Joy, and Purpose, and her third book, Mending Broken Branches, is due for release in October 2017. For more information on Elizabeth, to follow her blog, or to check out her speaking schedule, visit www.elizabethoates.com.


PRESS RELEASE

What Everybody Ought to Know About Helping Teens Work Through Their Parents’ Divorce

The teen years are difficult: raging hormones, acne, physical changes, cafeteria politics, bullying, and social media. Add the element of your parents’ divorce, and your teen angst just spewed all the way from the locker room to the band hall. Elizabeth Oates—author, blogger, and speaker—knows the pain of divorce all too well. While growing up she experienced divorce at three different ages and stages of life. While each experience was difficult, the teen years brought about a unique dynamic. “At a time when teens need stability, security, and someone to listen to them, my home life was unpredictable and chaotic,” Elizabeth says. It is her personal experience that led her to write, Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up as a resource for teens who want to process their thoughts and feelings. This six-week study contains both a leader’s guide and a participant’s guide so it can be done in both a group setting or individually. Topics covered include:

1. Identifying your feelings about divorce 2. Reasons for divorce 3. Life changes after divorce 4. Effectively communicating with your parents (and stepparents) 5. Choosing forgiveness 6. Growing closer to Christ

When adult children of divorce hear about Dealing with Divorce they often say, “I wish there had been something like this when I was a kid.” It might be too late for adults, but it’s not too late for teens. A resource exists that will bring them hope and healing and help move them into their future as a healthy individual. Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up was Elizabeth’s first book and is available on Amazon and most general retailers. Her second book, If You Could See as Jesus Sees, was released January 2016. Her third book, Mending Broken Branches, is due for release in October 2017. You can also follow Elizabeth’s blog, or get more information on her ministry and speaking schedule, at www.elizabethoates.com.


AUTHOR BIO

Growing up Elizabeth Oates was the child of multiple divorces, which also included addiction, abuse, abandonment, and general dysfunction. Yet, over the years, God has taught her that she is more than her family tree . . . she is a child of God. Today Elizabeth lives in the suburbs with her husband, five loud kids, and a dog that doesn’t shed. It’s embarrassingly cliché. Now that she has experienced both the light and the dark—the joy and the pain—she knows that no matter what our lives look like on the outside, we all need Jesus. Elizabeth earned her undergrad degree from Baylor University and her M.A. in Christian Education with a focus in Marriage and Family Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary. She is the author of three books including, Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up, If You Could See as Jesus Sees, and her third book, Mending Broken Branches: When God Reclaims Your Family Tree, which is due for release in January 2018. In her free time Elizabeth hangs out with friends, sneaks in a date night when she can, runs carpool, and cheers on her kids as they play a number of sports. She currently lives in Waco, Texas (sic ‘em Bears!) with her husband and five children (three bio kids, one they adopted through foster care, and one they are currently fostering). You can follow Elizabeth at www.elizabethoates.com.


AUTHOR Q&A

1. Describe your family history.

I grew up in a very dysfunctional family. My parents divorced when I was about two-years-old and my dad was never a consistent part of my life. My mom went on to remarry when I was in middle school and she divorced when I was in high school. She remarried again when I was in college and divorced when I was in my twenties. Along with divorce came addiction, abuse, abandonment, and neglect. Throughout my growing up years I also experienced a lot of instability, inconsistency, and loneliness.

2. Is this where you got the idea for your first book, Dealing with Divorce: Finding

Direction When Your Parents Split Up?

Yes. While I was growing up, I never saw a counselor or really talked to anyone to process my thoughts and feelings about my parents’ divorce. When I became an adult, I realized the many issues I needed to work through. When I would talk to divorced parents, they responded in one of three ways:

• “Look at you! You turned out great! That gives me hope for my own kids.” They painted me as the poster child for kids of divorce, hoping their kids turn out as well-adjusted as me.

• “Kids are resilient. They’ll be O.K.” They dismissed the effects of divorce on their kids and didn’t validate the pain their children experienced and didn’t give them permission to grieve.

• “My kids are doing great. I think they’re glad we got divorced.” They wanted to pretend nothing was wrong—either out of fear or worry—so they ignored the situation all together.

What I wanted (and still want) to say to those parents is, yes, I turned out relatively well-adjusted. But that is by God’s grace and many people’s prayers, not by my own efforts. And the remark that “kids are resilient” robs children of the emotional space and time they need to work through their feelings of sadness, anger, bitterness, fear, and resentment. I wrote Dealing with Divorce because I wanted to give both parents and kids the necessary tools to enable the kids to work through their thoughts and feelings during their parents’ divorce journey.


3. What is your family like today?

Today my family life is a complete 180 from what I knew growing up. God has blessed me with an incredible Godly husband. We have five kids: three biological, one we adopted through foster care, and one we are currently fostering. On the outside we look picture perfect, but I can tell you we are far from it. We work hard on improving our communication and we try to cultivate an atmosphere of stability, safety, and security for ourselves and for our children. We try to incorporate lots of tradition and family time together because we know our time is so fleeting.

4. Tell me about your faith.

Most of my childhood we were the typical “Christmas and Easter church-going family.” We were “good people.” If you had asked me if I was a Christian I would have said “yes” because I wasn’t Jewish, I wasn’t Hindu, and I wasn’t Buddhist, so I assumed I was Christian. But I really didn’t know what it meant to be a Christian. Then, after my mom’s second divorce, when I was a freshman in high school, she took me to church. I protested, sulked, and gave her teenage attitude the entire time, but it turned out to be the best thing she ever did for me. After hearing the gospel several times, I realized I was not going to survive this season of my life without Jesus. I knew there was something missing in my life . . . and He was it! I surrendered my life to Jesus that year and was baptized. My life was forever changed because my mom did not give up on me.

5. If you could tell divorced parents one thing about their teen, what would you say?

A lot of parents say to me, “Kids are resilient. They’ll be fine.” I think parents say this because they desperately want to believe their children will be fine, that they will walk away from the divorce completely unscathed. Unfortunately, this just isn’t true. The harsh reality of divorce is that, while it doesn’t have to ruin a teen’s life, it will shape his life. Parents need to accept this truth and address it. Instead of ignoring what their teen is going through and hoping for the best, parents need to validate what their teen is experiencing. Parents need to give their child the time space to grieve and emotionally process thee divorce.

The other thing parents say is, “Look at you. You turned out so normal. That gives me hope.” First I say, “Um, define ‘normal.’” Ha ha. But then I tell them, yes, I am relatively well-adjusted, yet I still have scars. My history affects my marriage, my parenting, even my friendships. I am a grown woman and yet I still have nightmares about my childhood—I will never escape my past. While God has done an incredible work in my life, there are repercussions. That’s not to make other parents—or even my own parents—feel guilty. That is just to remind parents that kids don’t just walk out of the battle field with a simple band-aid. There is a lot of work that must be done post-war to recover from the trauma.


6. Name someone who has been influential in your life.

My best friend’s mom, Linda, made a huge impact on my life. She was a second mom to me. During my sophomore year in high school I lived with their family. My mom had moved to another city and I wanted to finish out the school year, so Linda and her husband took me in. That time with their family gave me a glimpse into how a Christian family operates, how they treat one another, and how they love. I am forever impacted and grateful for their generosity and their love.

7. Where did you go to school?

I received my undergrad from Baylor University and my M.A. in Christian Education with a focus in Marriage and Family Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary.

8. What ministries are you involved in?

My husband and I have volunteered with a ministry called Legacy Family Ministries since 2007. This organization offers pre-marital education to engaged couples. We walk engaged couples through a 6-week curriculum and then end with a weekend retreat. We do this twice a year, in the fall and in the spring. We also started our own non-profit in 2008 called Project Restoration Ministry, which offers reduced-rate counseling for married couples in our city and matches up married couples with lay mentors. We taught a young married class at our church for five years but that recently ended due to logistical issues at the church. The class was for couples who had been married for 0-5 years with 0-1 kids. We wrote the curriculum and led the class with two other mentor couples. Our passion is definitely marriage and family ministry.

My husband and I became foster parents in 2014 and 2016 adopted our foster daughter in 2016. Three months later we took in a second foster placement—our daughter’s baby brother. This opportunity has allowed us to be a voice for the foster care movement in our city and to encourage those who are thinking about fostering.

9. Who are some of your favorite writers?

I love Jennie Allen. She writes from a place of humility and honesty and challenges her readers in their faith. I love a writer who convicts and pushes me to be more like Christ and less like myself.


I also love Priscilla Shirer. She is my favorite Bible teacher: sound in the word and full of passion. Mark Batterson is very inspiring as well. He makes a reader believe their prayers and dreams will come true because he writes from experience and conviction.

10. How do you balance it all?

Women often say, “I don’t know how you do it.” But the reality is, they are only looking at what I do. They are not looking at what I don’t do. And there is a long list of what I don’t do. I don’t garden, I don’t sew, I don’t craft, I don’t cook recipes that contain more than five ingredients, and I dropped out of book club after the second book. What I do is ask myself two things:

• How much capacity do I have during this season of my life? • What are my priorities?

Then it’s like filling a bucket full of rocks. My capacity is my bucket and my priorities are my rocks. I start filling my bucket with my most important rocks. Once my bucket is full and I can’t fit any more rocks, the other rocks on my list will just have to wait. I reevaluate my capacity and my priorities from time to time and adjust as needed. I also tell women, with every child they have, they lose a little more freedom. I decided early on that I don’t have the luxury of attending Pampered Chef parties, Origami Owl parties, freezer meal parties, etc. Currently my family has kids’ activities almost every day of the week, so I must choose what I’m willing to release in my own life in order to make our family work, and these parties were something easy for me to release. We need to look for easy ways to lighten our load and be comfortable with disappointing people if it means serving our family well.

11. What is your advice to other moms these days?

My advice is to avoid comparison. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” This is especially difficult in our social media generation. We discuss this at length in, If You Could See as Jesus Sees. Comparing our everyday, mundane lives to the sparkly, eventful lives we see online is a dangerous game we play that leads to negative self-talk, self-loathing, and a distorted sense of reality. We can see one picture on Facebook of our friend’s vacation and it easily sends us into a downward spiral. I advise women to keep life (and social media) in perspective. Remember the blessings God has given them and realize social media is like reality TV . . . it’s not truly “reality.”


12. What is your favorite: • movie – 12 Years a Slave • book – Sacred Marriage • song or music group – How He Loves by The David Crowder Band • hobby – teaching yoga, Pilates, and barre classes. • thing to do with your family: go on a hike, swimming in our backyard, family movie

nights. Attending Baylor football games.


BOOK INFO 1. How does, Dealing with Divorce, shed new light on a common issue?

With the divorce boom of the 80’s, the words “I don’t” have become as normal as saying “I do.” If you are not divorced, you most likely have a family member or friend who is. Divorce is as common as peanut butter and jelly. While the number of churches offering DivorceCare and DivorceCare for Kids programs is increasing, there is a serious void in the market for teenagers. Dealing with Divorce fills that void, addressing teens ages 13-18. The Participant’s Guide deals with the issue of divorce from a teen’s perspective, allowing space for hope and healing. The Leader’s Guide helps youth pastors, counselors, parents, mentors, and lay leaders understand what teens are thinking and feeling so they can more effectively minister to teens.

2. Is this a topic to which teenagers can easily relate?

Unfortunately, divorce has become all too common among teens in our society. Statistics tell us:

• 50% of all North-American children will witness the divorce of their parents. Almost half of them will also see the breakup of a parent’s second marriage.

• One out of 10 children of divorce experiences three or more parental marriage breakups.

• 40% of children growing up in America today are being raised without their fathers.i

Teenagers whose parents are divorced are hungry for a resource like Dealing with Divorce. Many of them resist talking to their parents. Sometimes they don’t want to see a counselor, and if they aren’t connected to a church or if their church doesn’t offer the Dealing with Divorce program, they have no place to turn. They can easily relate to this curriculum because it speaks directly to their experience. The stories and examples are written with teens in mind, and the reflection questions encourage the reader to dive deeper at the end of each chapter.


If a teen’s church does offer the program, then they will experience the camaraderie from other teens whose parents are divorced and find solace in knowing they are not alone in walking this journey.

3. Who is the target audience?

The target audience for the Participant’s Guide is 13-18-year-olds (sixth – twelfth grades) whose parents are going through a divorce or are already divorced. The target audience for the Leader’s Guide is youth pastors, counselors, parents, mentors, and lay leaders who want to help hurting teens process their thoughts and feelings about their parents’ divorce.

4. How is this issue significant in today’s culture?

A divorced friend once said to me, “I think the reason our churches don’t know what to do with the issue of divorce is because the consequences are so far reaching.” While churches are certainly doing a better job ministering to divorced families, we still have a long way to go to help them feel included and loved. I think many churches—and individuals for that matter—don’t know how to address divorced people. So, out of fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, they say and do nothing.

Yet, this cannot be the approach we take with our teens. We cannot ignore their feelings and hope they magically “get over it.” The following statistics tell us that post-divorce, our teens are hurting.

• Teenage children of divorce are three times more likely (35% versus 13%) to need psychological help within a given year.

• Children from divorced homes have more psychological problems versus children from which one of the parents has died.

• The high school dropout rate of children of divorced parents is roughly two times

higher than that of children of which the parents did not divorce.

• In 1991 a study was done of children from which the parents were divorced in 1985. The study found that even after all that time, these children tended to be lonely, unhappy, anxious and insecure.

• 70% of long-term prison inmates grew up in broken homes.ii

Our children deserve better than these outcomes. They deserve better than bearing psychological problems. They deserve better than turning into high school dropouts. They deserve better than feeling lonely, unhappy, anxious and insecure. They deserve better than ending up in prison.


They can avoid this fate if we simply give them the tools they need to work through their anger, hurt, disappointment, fears, frustrations, worries, anxieties, and other feelings associated with their parents’ divorce.

5. What are the unique features found in, Dealing with Divorce?

The Participant’s Guide contains questions throughout each chapter to keep teens engaged. It’s a running dialogue, not a book that preaches at them. Each chapter ends with more reflection questions and even challenging activities such as writing a letter to their parents. Every question and activity promotes growth and healing in the lives of the reader. The Leader’s Guide enables leaders to adjust the program from a six to twelve-week program. Elizabeth offers additional activities for each week so if leaders want to extend one week into two weeks, they have extra material to use. The Leader’s Guide also comes with activity suggestions including songs to play, group exercises, and skits. All of these elements promote group interaction and conversation among the teens.

6. How is the author’s unique background different from most authors? While growing up, Elizabeth lived through divorce at three different ages and stages of her life. Along with divorce she experienced addiction, abuse, abandonment, stepfamilies, and overall dysfunction. While her childhood was full of insecurity and instability, God protected her and broke the cycle of divorce. Today she is married to her college sweetheart and together they are raising five children (three biological, one they adopted through foster care, and they are currently fostering). Although she earned an M.A. in Christian Education with a focus in Marriage and Family Studies from Dallas Theological Seminary, she credits her life experience—more than her book knowledge—to helping her minister to broken families.


MEDIA Dallas Theological Seminary Profiles Elizabeth was chosen as one of nine alumni (one of two women) in 2011 as a “DTS Profile”. Other women chosen over the years include notable authors such as Priscilla Shirer and Jennie Allen. DTS shows Profile videos at donor, recruiting, and other seminary events. To view this three-minute video, click here. DivorceCare DivorceCare included Elizabeth in their revised video curriculum (2012) as the marriage/family/divorce “expert” on children and teens. Other “experts” included on the DVD curriculum include Dave Ramsey, Kay Arthur, and Dr. Tony Evans. To see a portion of the interview, visit Elizabeth’s website. Legacy Family Ministries Since 2007 Elizabeth Oates and her husband, Brandon, have served with Legacy Family Ministries, a ministry that provides premarital education for engaged couples. They lead groups of couples through a six-week class in the fall and in the spring, and each class ends with a weekend retreat. Elizabeth and Brandon were chosen for Legacy’s promotional video (2011). To view this video, click here.

IMAGES To download a graphic of the Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up, Leader’s Guide book cover, click here. To download a graphic of the Dealing with Divorce: Finding Direction When Your Parents Split Up, Participant’s Guide book cover, click here.


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i http://www.children-and-divorce.com/children-divorce-statistics.html#general Downloaded October 16, 2015 ii Ibid.

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