Guiding Good Choices
Helping guide adolescents to make healthy choices by equipping their parents with evidence-based parenting approaches.
Who Is This Program For?
Guiding Good Choices is a parenting program under the auspices of the Center for Communities that Care (CTC) at the University of Washington. Facilitated by SAR High School faculty members, who are trained by CTC’s Guiding Good Choices program, parents participate in a series of five 2-hour sessions to help them strengthen their relationships with their children, support their children in making healthy choices, and manage family conflict.
What Are The Areas of Study?
Guiding Good Choices helps parents help their children. Relying on a body of research about how to achieve healthier outcomes in adolescents, Guiding Good Choices provides parents with tools to parent more effectively, set guidelines for their children and follow through on them, communicate their values, and foster bonding.
What Can A Participant Expect?
A participant can expect five two-hour sessions of meaningful and honest conversation, practical strategies, and building community with a cohort of parents who share the goal of helping our children become productive, healthy, connected, committed Jewish adults.
Beyond the Program:
The social development strategy that underlies Guiding Good Choices has applicability in all realms of adolescent development. Beyond our deep investment in bringing GGC to our parent body, we are also working to bring the social developent approach into SAR High School, to inform our interactions with students and help foster healthy bonding which, in turn, encourages students to make healthy choices. We are also bringing GGC to other Jewish schools and communities, sharing our research and experience to help create a climate that fosters healthy adolescent development across our community.
To find out more about our program and how you can join our cohort or bring this program to your community
Teen Substance Abuse Survey
This year, Machon Siach at SAR High School continued its role in deepening our community’s understanding of challenges to adolescent wellbeing, and sharing effective, evidence-based interventions for addressing those challenges. In February, we once again surveyed thousands of Modern Orthodox 10th and 12th graders in 17 high schools across the United States to gather data about our children’s emotional wellbeing; connection to parents, schools, and community; and antisocial behavior such as gambling and substance use. The data gathered were fascinating in themselves, and valuable when compared to the data previously gathered in 2019 and 2020. In May, we invited principals from all of the participating schools to SAR High School to see a presentation about what we had learned from the survey, and to hear about Guiding Good Choices.
Click here to review the data.
Program Leadership
GGC Facilitators
Ms. Ilana Gadish
Dr. Russell Hoffman
Ms. Shifra Landowne
Dr. Yoni Mandelbaum
Ms. Lisa Birnbaum
Dr. Randi Shane
Participating Schools
Building on our work, the OU created a program called Gen Alef and a number of other schools in the New York/New Jersey area began implementing this program in their schools.
