TFT: Kids and Trauma
June 29, 2026
Send Pastor Matt Your Kids’ Summer Schedules
Summer sports, concerts, and dramas are here! Don’t forget to send Pastor Matt information about when your kids are playing games, singing in concerts, dancing in competitions, marching in parades, and performing dramas. He would love to make it to as many possible, cheering on your kids and spending quality time with your family.
Summer Books for the Mama Theologian
Tiny Theologians recently published a blog post for Mamas as we jump into summer. In it, the writer acknowledges the different routine that summer can bring. This can serve as a blessing with slower days and less rigidity, but also as a hindrance due to a lack of structure and a home that isn’t quite as quiet with kids who are now home from school. The writer then suggests seven theological books for Mamas to engage with scripture. All of them come from trusted authors like Ruth Chou Simons, Jen Wilkin, and Emily Jensen and Laura Wifler and would make great additions to your summer bookshelf. Check out the post and see what might intrigue you!
God’s Story: A Summer in the Gospel Together
In a recent Friday Family Email, Child Discipleship shared a fantastic resource for families to use over the summer. God’s Story: A Summer in the Gospel Together contains family worship guides, activities, and more to keep your family on track this summer. I love that this is intended to be done together as a family, helping parents to engage with their children well. Check it out here!
This Week’s Challenge: Praying for our Country
Do you have plans to celebrate Independence Day this week? A family cookout? A parade? Fireworks? The 4th of July can be a fun holiday for family activities.
As Americans, we are blessed with many freedoms, privileges and rights that are not universal across the globe. We should be thankful for those! However, we also live in a country that faces deep political division, inequalities and injustices, immorality, and brokenness. This week’s challenge is to take time as a family to pray for our country. Thank God for the good gifts he has given us here in the US, but also pray for some of those things listed above. Pray for needs you see in your community across our state, and nationwide, for just law-making and those in leadership at all levels. Pray for the church in our country to increase its effectiveness in sharing the Good News. Be sure to have your child(ren) chime in, too!
“Jesus the Healer” Kids Bible Class Devotional
You have free access to a family devotional based on the curriculum our kids are studying each week in KBC! It’s called “The Gospel Project at Home.” Today’s Bible Study is “Healings in Galilee” (Volume 8: Unit 22: Session 4), and the devotional can be found at this link.
Visit the Family Ministries page on our website for information about how to access The Gospel Project at Home for the first time.
And for Dessert…
Our recommendation for family discipleship this week is a short video that helps parents support their children when they go through a traumatic experience.
We live in a scary world where bad things happen to people we love, including, sadly, our children. As much as we wish we could always protect them from any trouble or trauma, we can’t. And trauma will always raise questions and concerns that linger afterwards.
In this video from CCEF, counselor, educator, and author Darby Strickland offers wise advice to parents when their kids or someone they know have gone through some terrible life event. She encourages parents to start with reassurance, be curious about their reactions and how they are processing what happened, be patient in pursuit of their hearts, have short conversations to draw them out, help them to make sense of what happened in biblical categories, and direct them to trust the Lord.
She concludes, “Caring for a child in distress is not something you will do alone. God hears, he helps, he strengthens, he provides for our children and us when intense suffering enters their lives. So we have this cause to live expectantly, waiting to see how the Lord will be at work restoring and healing, and when we have our children seeing us having this hope, hope that Jesus is the largest shaping influence on their lives, and not the trauma, it will help them heal.”
More:
– Read the transcript of the video online.
– Access more resources on trauma from the Christian Counseling and Education Foundation (CCEF)
– CCEF has provided a free downloadable copy of Darby Stricklands booklet, “When Children Experience Trauma” online.
– Strickland has also written a children’s book on this same topic, Something Scary Happened: Helping Children through Trauma.
May the Lord keep our kids from traumatic experiences and at the same prepare us to help them if they come.
Jordyn Skacel, Director of Family Ministry
Matt Mitchell, Pastor