Youth Achieve Healthier Relationships

Story in Brief

The Relationships Smart program helps youth develop healthy skills to make romantic relationship decisions by showing them healthy ways of being treated and treating others. To help educate youth across Crisp County on the importance of healthy relationships, the UGA Extension agent taught in-school and out-of-school programs. Each series was comprised of 6 to 13 lessons from the Relationship Smarts 4.0 curriculum. Each lesson was 45 to 90 minutes long and included workbooks, lecture, hands-on learning activities and in-depth discussions. The lessons' objectives were to help youth identify their own values, understand a foundation for healthy relationships, understand unhealthy versus healthy dating relationships, develop effective communication and conflict management skills and understand their own impact. A total of 72 Crisp County Youth participated in the Relationship Smarts program. Evaluations revealed that 77 percent of participants were likely or very likely to use the skills learned, 80.3 percent felt the program was helpful or very helpful, 70.3 percent would recommend the program to their friends, and 71.7 percent reported feeling better about themselves after the series. One participant said, “There is always a way to solve things.”

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• Crisp County Youth Achieve Healthier Relationships