With news reports of bullying, privacy issues online, sexting, and student suicides, Living from the Inside Out, offers a particularly timely message for students, teachers and families:  a call for cultural change that focuses on shifting our priorities from valuing materialism, fame, accolades and other external, often shallow rewards to timeless, internal values that will sustain our children and our nation.

How has 21st century life altered the challenge of living a life that demonstrates those timeless qualities of compassion, empathy, respect,  personal responsibility, and integrity; what impact is this cultural shift having on families, schools and the nation? How must we educate today’s students whose online realities highlight a need for personal integrity and internal values that go beyond the trophies, test scores and prestige that so many seek? Inside Out offers resources for students, parents, and teachers including:

• Teen Authored Book for Students and Facilitator’s Guide for Adults. The non-fiction student book profiles the stories of real students struggling to make healthy, life-changing choices in today’s complex world. The book includes 26 short stories each correlating to character trait and life skill with discussion questions and journaling activities at the end of each chapter.  Chandler DeWitt, a teen author who is now a college student, calls upon teens to “learn to live from the inside out rather than allow life to turn us inside out.” Borrowing a lesson taught by her college president and mentor, Dr. Nido R. Qubein, she reminds us all that the word education comes from the Greek derivative “educo,” which means to develop or change from within.  The Facilitator Guide provides a resource for adults to help facilitate discussions and lessons with students on developing positive life skills and character traits.

• A Multimedia Website.   The website includes streaming videos of the students profiled in the book,  an extensive interview with the teen author, and a half-hour television documentary focused on “living from the inside out” with interviews from students, teachers, parents and national experts including Jean Twenge, PhD and Assistant Professor at San Diego State University, and Keith Campbell, PhD and Professor at University of Georgia. Twenge and Campbell authored one of nation’s most comprehensive studies focusing on child mental health dating back seven decades, finding that young people  today report four times higher depression and anxiety rates than those of students of the 1930s Great Depression era possibly due to a shifting focus in American values  and  methods of motivating students.