Dating Violence
In our work with teens all across our state, we found that every group had great concerns about the topic of dating violence. This lesson is designed to create awareness about some of the issues the teens felt would be important and encourages the teacher and class to make use of the CDC’s excellent Choose Respect resource materials.
Relationships And Change
This lesson is designed to help youth discriminate between a healthy and unhealthy relationship. It also raises the issue that relationships can change over time, and sometimes the changes partners experience may not be healthy. The lesson focuses on the importance of recognizing that unhealthy changes are occurring. This lesson may be used to provide background for further work on this topic, encouraging students to seek help and break the relationship when it becomes necessary.
Relationships In The Media
Teens may assume they "know" a great deal about the lives of celebrities and the types of relationships they have with their significant others. As only one example among many, consider a couple such as Rihanna and Chris Brown. Both were well known stars who received a great deal of media coverage appearing in many happy-looking photos together. Yet behind all the media hype, their relationship was a very troubled one. Your students will be able to cite many other examples of celebrity relationships that they later discovered were unhealthy. Since many teens do not consider an unhealthy relationship to be such a big deal, it’s important to focus on what happened AFTER the abuse in celebrity cases such as the Brown case were reported.