Back to School Series--Alleviating Back to School Anxiety

As a new school year begins, here are some ways you as parents can help your kids get off to a smooth start:

Career Counseling and Coaching

"What do you do?" Many people have been asked that question thousands of times. We are socialized early on in life to the importance of work with the question, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" To most people, a career is much more than just a means to surviving. A person's career is a valuable source of identity, a well of friendships and associations, and a way in which people derive meaning and life satisfaction. When things are not going well on the job or a member of the family has lost his/her job, it can foster discouragement and isolation.

The Blessing of a Job (One Man's Encouraging Outcome)

“…the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words were heard…”

Daniel 10:12

When hard times hit, my friend’s business was devastated. She did everything possible to survive and experienced hardships that would sour your stomach. Fortunately, our friendship stayed in tact with one exception. Every week she watched me wear fancy suits, sharp looking shirts and ties, and a watch that brought numerous compliments. She wondered if I had lost track of reality and allowed my success to swell my head.

Christian Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (Help for Anxiety, Depression and more)

As a new Christian and a Psychology major in college, it was difficult to make what I was learning fit with what I was coming to believe. I was taught a broad range of psychological theories, and I searched each one for what would be a good fit with biblical teaching. Some theories seemed appealing, like humanism and it’s teaching that people are basically good, but did not stand up to Christian doctrine like original sin. I finally settled on cognitive-behavioral approaches, in part because that was the dominant theory of my school, and also because it seemed to combine the best parts of a few different theories. I started putting it into practice after graduation and found that it worked much of the time.

Coping With Anxiety

Anxiety has always been a formidable emotional problem for many people, young and old alike, to overcome. Certainly, it seems that there is more reason than ever nowadays to feel anxious or to worry about what the future may hold. All one needs to do is flip to a news channel on the television, click on the news headlines on the internet, or turn on the radio to be overwhelmed by all of the bad news of the day.