How to Plan a Parent Workshop Event

You want every parent to trust you. Each time they drop off their kids or teenagers with you, you’ll want them to feel secure and safe knowing you’ll take care of kids and that you have their best interests in mind. One of the best ways to show parents you care about who they are and how they’re engaging with their families is by offering an annual Parent Workshop.

A Parent Workshop is a training event for the parents of the kids and teenagers in your ministry. Your main audience is the parents who are already connected to your ministry, but you can market the event to new or prospective parents as well.

A great Parent Workshop should be interactive, inspiring, encouraging, and educational. You want this event to show parents you truly believe they’re the primary influences in their kids life and you are here to help them succeed. It’s all a part of your parent strategy — to build trust with parents and their families (And if you don’t have a family strategy, just steal ours!)

So what do you need for a Parent Workshop? First, start by looking for a two to three-hour window on your calendar. These Workshops don’t need to be long, they just need to be focused. We’ve found it’s best to look for a time on your calendar when parents are already at your church, like after service or before or after your weekly program.

Then, you’ll want to think through a few things…

FOOD

Food is an essential for every meeting. From snacks to full meals, sharing food together helps us feel connected to the people in our meetings. Depending on what time you’re holding your meeting, you should consider offering to cover lunch or dinner for parents. To keep it simple, you could order a sandwich platter and some bags of chips or the ministry go-to — pizza with salad. As you’re thinking through your meal, remember to consider any possible food allergies and have options available!

TRAINING

The main focus for this Parent Workshop is to hold two training sessions full of practical and relevant information for parents — the main teaching session and the break out session.

MAIN SESSION

For your main session, you’ll want to focus on one topic that is relevant to all of the parents there, like your discipleship strategy or how parents can use their gifts to serve with their families. Whatever your topic, make sure you can talk about it for around 15 minutes. You might also want to consider sharing the stage or prerecording some of your training content so more of your team members can be in front of parents throughout your event. A prerecorded video helps to take some of the pressure off of you to be an expert, and it can help to create a more interactive environment with a variety of voices sharing in the training.

And if you’re wondering “What could I even talk about?” Don’t worry. We’ve already prepared a training outline for you in our Parent Workshop Bundle!

BREAKOUT SESSIONS

You’ll need to recruit a little bit of help for these breakout sessions. You’ll want to look for volunteers in your ministry, parents, and other members of your kids and student staff to lead your breakout sessions. Make sure whoever you recruit is prepared to not only share information but also lead an active conversation.

These breakout sessions are the time where parents can break into smaller, discussion-oriented groups and continue the conversation. As you move to breakouts, you can narrow the focus of your training content. So if your main session was about your discipleship strategy, your breakouts can extend your conversation by talking about five ways parents can disciple their families at home. If you’re planning to have both kids and student ministries host a Parent Workshop together as one large meeting, you’ll want to create spaces for your parents to break off into groups for each age group — preschool, elementary, middle school, and high school. That way, you can be strategic and target the specific needs for parents, kids, and teenagers rather than share general tips.

ENVIRONMENT

Aside from your teaching, the other important aspect to consider is your environment. The way you set up your main room and breakout rooms will help give shape to your training.

Since you’re providing food, you’ll want your main space to be a space where lunch or dinner can be served. This will help reduce transition times and help your meeting move along on time. If you can, set up some round tables and tablecloths so parents can eat together and interact during the first training session.

You’ll also want a few breakout spaces which you can set up with tables or rows of chairs. You can set up as many of these as you think will be helpful, but we recommend at least one room for parents of teenagers, one for parents of kids in elementary school, and one for parents of preschoolers. If you can, adding a refreshment table in each breakout room for a quick snack or coffee break can communicate how much you care!

And to help remove any barrier that may keep parents from attending your workshop, you may want to consider providing childcare for your event. Bring in extra volunteers or pay some responsible teenagers to take care of all the kids throughout this Parent Workshop.

With your food, teaching, and environment details ready, here’s a sample schedule for how your event could flow…

SAMPLE SCHEDULE

And that’s just about everything you’ll need to start running Parent Workshops on your own! We know it may seem like a lot, but helping train parents while giving them a space to create connections with the other parents in your ministry will go a long way in building their trust. You’ll get to pass on important information about your ministry and they get to make a new friend or two! It’s a win all around!

And if you’re using Grow Curriculum, we’ve made it easy for you! In Grow Kids and Grow Student Curriculum we give you everything you need to develop your own Parent Workshops — marketing materials, training outlines for your main and breakout sessions, a shopping list, and a timeline for how to prepare!