Excerpt from our Winter 2017 newsletter.  For this article and others, please click here: Winter 2017 Newsletter.

As you can imagine, the most difficult part of our job is hearing about things that have happened to the women and children we serve each day and seeing the impact that it has had in their lives.

We believe that parenting is the most important role we play in life and that to support a mom to be the best parent she can be is a very important part of how we can serve her effectively and support her to realize a safe, healthy, and peaceful life in the future.
Being able to share life with her and her children, even short term, can assist her to provide a different picture to her children who have been caught up in an abusive home. We know that these children learn what they live, things such as:

• It’s okay to hurt others to get your own way…
• The world is a scary place, it is never safe….
• My mom is to blame, dad says it is all her fault…
• Promises don’t really matter…
• When dad hurts us, he doesn’t get into trouble….
• A person can love you and get to be mean to you at the same time….
• Men should always be in charge…
• Women are weak, helpless, and stupid…

However, we also know that children are resilient and can thrive, and that living with violence as a child is not a “life sentence” for a bad future. We can work with moms to change the lives of their children for the better, exchanging harmful thinking with positive messages, and developing life skills and healthy coping strategies that will provide stability in the years ahead.

It has been our privilege to see children over the years who have grown up and escaped the cycle of violence in their lives.