Building Bridges: Biblical Counseling Activities for Children and Teens

Knowing how to approach children and teens in counseling can be a challenge. Learning to enter into their world and draw them out can sometimes feel impossible. But with Julie Lowe’s Building Bridges—a practical workbook of expressive activities to do with kids and teens in counseling—you will find the biblical tools you’re looking for. Anyone who has ever heard a child say, “I don’t know” in answer to a question about what they are thinking and feeling or about why they acted a certain way, will be thankful for these thoughtful, biblically wise, and creative ways to engage young people. Julie Lowe, drawing on decades of experience in counseling children has compiled helpful, practical ways to speak the gospel into children and teenager’s lives. By building bridges with young people, we can build bridges with them to the Lord. With over fifteen years of counseling experience and by working as a registered play therapist supervisor, Julie Lowe understands there is a need to speak truth and hope into the lives of children and teens in a hands-on, meaningful way. That’s why the activities and reproducible worksheets in Building Bridges can be used over and over in multiple contexts. As part of CCEF’s Helping the Helper series, this workbook walks counselors, teachers, parents, and caregivers through the rationale for expressive activities, provides examples, and then shows counselors how to do it themselves. Upon the purchase of this product, customers will be given access to downloadable, colorized versions of each of the interactive charts and graphics, with the option of creating printable posters for their ministry. By pointing to the Lord through expressive mediums, counselors and youth workers will be able to reach kids and teens in a unique, biblical way.

Publisher: New Growth Press
Type: Paperback
ISBN: 9781645070504

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Julie Lowe, MA, is a faculty member at CCEF and a licensed professional counselor with nearly twenty years of counseling experience. Julie is also a registered play therapist and has developed a play therapy office at CCEF to better serve families, teens, and children. Julie is the author of Child Proof and Building Bridges, as well as the minibook Helping Your Anxious Child. Julie and her husband, Greg, have six children and serve as foster and adoptive parents.

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“Truth be told, children and adolescents who are struggling with life often leave parents, teachers, youth ministry staff, and counselors mystified. Julie Lowe understands this and has written a book that is intended to fill in the gap between the theologically profound and the how-to practical. Building Bridges grounds the process of counseling children in a model that is not based on behavioral modification language but on the language of the gospel. Parenting, after all, is the most challenging form of discipleship that there is. Building Bridges provides the reader with a pattern of entering and exploring the life of a child and in that context winning their trust, providing hope to their heart, and offering a pathway to change.” Jeffrey S. Black, Professor and Chair, Department of Counseling & Psychology, Cairn University; licensed psychologist; director of counseling services, Oasis Center