About Us

About Us...

I'm Larry Evans --

Hello to all you courageous parents of hormonally turbulent teens. My name is Larry Evans. I teach the Career Development class at the Dauphin County Technical School (DCTS) in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This web site and the other projects described below have come about as a result of the Parent Seminar I share with the parents of ninth and tenth-grade students at DCTS. The Parent Seminar is based on the "Personal and Social Responsibility" (PSR) curriculum, used by the students and developed by Ms. Constance Dembrowsky, president of the Institute for Affective Skill Development.

In Career Development, I teach the PSR curriculum to each ninth-grade class that comes into DCTS. The PSR course is viewed by DCTS as an essential part of each student's overall education. Through the lessons students develop their sense of responsibility. They learn that they can get what they want while acting in ways that maintain dignity and respect for themselves and others. The lessons teach students how to stick to commitments, relate in ways that promote cooperation and decrease conflict, deal productively with anger, and cope with the "real world" choices that they will make at work, with their families and throughout life.

The Parent Seminar introduces parents to the specific skills their teenagers are developing in the student course. The program helps parents develop specific techniques they can use at home to support and facilitate their teenagers' developing affective skills. Parents themselves gain an understanding of how they can achieve greater success in their own lives as they personally apply the principles introduced and begin to enhance their own skills in the areas of self-esteem, responsibility, relating effectively, problem-solving and goal-setting.

I'm John Borland --

Hi to everyone, parents and friends. My name is John Borland. Together with my wife Judy I am the parent of two energetic boys, my thirteen-year-old son, Joshua and my twenty-one-year-old stepson (and no longer a boy), Troy. Judy and I are graduates of Larry Evans' Year 2000 Parent Seminar. I came to the Parent Seminar through my desire to support Troy's entry into the DCTS ninth-grade Exploratory Program. I could tell you who I am and what impact Larry and the Parent Seminar has had on me, but I think the letter I sent to Larry during the class will do that much better.

As good as the Parent Seminar was, I saw that the six-week course by itself was not going to be enough to truly integrate the skills I was beginning to learn and to rewire my negative brain.

For the sake of my family, I felt the need to internalize these lessons and feared that, without more exposure, I would lose what I was gaining. It was very apparent to me from viewing the deep emotions generated in our class toward Larry and the PSR course that other parents felt the same way. I began to realize that all of us parents today are too much alone against the world and in need of mutual support and contact to maintain hope, change outlooks and grow in our affective abilities.

With these motivators in my mind, I proposed to Larry the following ideas intended to bring together a caring, interactive and supportive parent community:

These Are Our Projects --

Words of Caring -- The first idea. A free, e-mail based newsletter designed to help connect and network interested parents and friends. Words of Caring is intended to deliver a variety of items that will provide encouragement, lend example, refresh lessons from the Parent Seminar, share experiences, announce events and provide you a local voice through which to touch and be touched by other parents.

Through Larry's generous efforts, the first issue of Words of Caring was printed and delivered by mail in December of 2000 to over 420 families in the Harrisburg area. E-mail subscriptions from these and other parents are now growing.

Words of Caring is available to any interested person, parent or friend, living anywhere through this web site and via e-mail. Simply send an e-mail message to AffectiveSkill@aol.com to join our community and begin receiving your personal copies.

The Parent Exploratory Group -- The second idea is to bring together a local support group for Parent Seminar and other interested parents and friends. Titled the Parent Exploratory Group (PEG), the central focus of PEG is to produce an intimate and caring environment in which we parents can grow together in further learning and more fully applying the affective skills that were introduced in the Parent Seminar. This journey to more effective personal relationships will take us through a mixture of activities to refresh seminar lessons, study reference materials, share personal and family experiences, and encourage constructive group discussion. We also now have the opportunity to offer a parent program based on Connie Dembrowsky’s exciting new "Mastering Anger - Resolving Conflict" curriculum.

While unfortunately PEG can only be made available to Harrisburg area parents, we will try our best to provide those valuable and printable outcomes of PEG sessions to our larger parent community here on the web and through the pages of Words of Caring.

Affective Skills Web Site -- Our newest idea, the Affective Skills Web Site, offers a new door through which to provide information and ideas to you, our new community of parents and friends. Through the Affective Skills Web Site we can more easily provide you with one-stop shopping for suggestions, inspirations, resources, news and ideas that we hope you will find valuable and helpful. We want to keep the web site fresh and alive with new feedback, links... and an occasional surprise here and there, that will be easily available and useful to all of us in better dealing with our children, friends, co-workers, significant others and life in general.

And We Invite You To Join Us --

The success of everything we are trying to do here depends on you. We very much need your interest and active involvement to build our new community. Your sharing of yourself and your family; your stories, experiences and impressions, successes and failures, joys, fears and all the rest here on the Affective Skills Web Site, in Words of Caring at PEG and on e-mail is what will make this work and bring us together as a community of sharing and hope for ourselves and for one another. Please click on the "Submission Guidelines" link to see how you can join in.

We are very sure that we have only so far touched the surface of all that is possible in this area of Affective Skills. We invite your comments and suggestions for what you would like to see on the Affective Skills Web Site, read in Words of Caring or cover through the Parent Exploratory Group. Simply send your ideas on e-mail to AffectiveSkill@aol.com.

Affective Skills Web Site

Last Modified: April 08, 2005