The family unit experiences various levels of stress, whether unexpected and unsolicited or intentional and preventable. Relational stressors in a home where adolescents are present create a complicated dynamic during this critical stage of growth and learning. When a child’s home life is in turmoil, the child can struggle much more to concentrate, learn new concepts and skills, and build healthy views of themselves and others than children who come from healthy homes with supportive caregivers.

Family Frameworks educates 2500 teens each year in Murray, Gordon, and Whitfield counties with classes that create understanding in areas that affect identity and character building in the teen years and how that relates to their relationships with others. Our efforts provide relationship education to prevent unhealthy and harmful relationship habits from developing.

Our theme, “Choose to Lead,” strongly encourages honorable leadership behaviors, mimicking individuals’ attributes that motivate and influence their peers in the present and ultimately in the future. In the relationship-building phase of maturing, our Healthy Choices/Healthy Relationships program strongly emphasizes the Pathway to Success principles:

• Graduate high school.
• Pursue post-secondary education.
• Get a job/career.
• Then after all of the above, pursue long-term relationships that lead to potentially creating a family unit.

The Pathway to Success model per the Dibble Institute shows a success rate of 97% of individuals that follow it in order; It’s guaranteed that these individuals do not end up in poverty. These dynamics decrease teen pregnancy rates and often end the poverty cycle in families where poverty has infiltrated for generations.