When Kids Hurt: Help for Adults Navigating the Adolescent Maze

Chap Clark's groundbreaking Hurt: Inside the World of Today's Teenagers revealed the hard truth about contemporary adolescence: societal changes and systemic abandonment have left teenagers struggling to navigate the ever lengthening and ever more difficult transition to adulthood without caring adults.

When Kids Hurt offers these challenging insights to youth workers and parents in a more accessible form, with greater focus on how adults should respond. Practical sidebars and application sections, contributed by other youth experts, provide additional insights into youth culture and how adults can better guide adolescents into adulthood. This book will be an important resource for youth workers, parents, counselors, and others who work with youth.

From the Back Cover

What's really going on in the hidden world of today's teenagers?

To get below the surface, Chap Clark spent a year in a high school and interviewed dozens of students about everything from their families and social lives to their loneliness and insecurity. An alarming picture emerged: adults have abandoned kids to navigate the ever-lengthening and ever more difficult transition to adulthood on their own, and the results are devastating. Unable to cope with the pressures of expectations and hurt of abandonment, teenagers retreat to their own world of youth culture to survive, and few adults care enough to engage them there.

Here Clark and Rabey sum up the provocative research, which was detailed in Clark's bestselling book Hurt, and lay out practical ways caring adults can have a profound impact on teens. This book is an essential guide for youth pastors and volunteer leaders, educators, counselors, parents, and all adults seeking to reach out to today's adolescents.

"When Hurt came out, it changed the landscape of youth ministry. In When Kids Hurt, Chap Clark and Steve Rabey have taken us on the next step of the journey--to helping us know how to respond to kids who have been neglected and, in Chap's words, 'systematically abandoned.'"--Doug Fields, pastor to the life development team, Saddleback Church

"Chap and Steve have done us all a huge favor--parents and practitioners alike--by taking us deeper into the reality of adolescent brokenness while providing us with practical suggestions on how to move toward a 'fix.'"--Walt Mueller, president, Center for Parent/Youth Understanding

"This book helps adults get inside the mind and life of adolescents like no other."--Jim Burns, president, HomeWord, author of The Purity Code

"Chap Clark and Steve Rabey have captured the pain of adolescents better than anyone I know. The first time I read this book, I couldn't put it down."--Kara Powell, executive director, Fuller Youth Institute

"This is must reading for parents and youth workers alike."--Wayne Rice, cofounder, Youth Specialties

Chap Clark is vice dean for the School of Theology and Regional Campuses Master's Programs and professor of youth, family, and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary. He is senior editor of YouthWorker Journal and the author of several books, including the award-winning Hurt, and Disconnected, a book for parents.

Steve Rabey is an award-winning writer and editor who has authored or collaborated on over twenty books. He is the editor of YouthWorker Journal.