It's All Your Fault,

Tyler Price! 

Ben Decter

Parent group at Cheerful Helpers was not for me. Not at first. I was reluctant to share what I considered our family’s private struggles. When my wife – an avid sharer -- would express her deepest fears and concerns about our vulnerable child in front of this roomful of new faces, I would feel my shoulders tightening. I’d squeeze her hand, hoping she’d understand my subtle
sign to stop revealing our inner life.

Boy how things change.

With the encouragement of our group leader, I started to open up. To my surprise, it felt good. To my bigger surprise, my wife teared up the first time I shared – really shared. As she explained to me later, my opening up felt like a gift—to her, and to my whole family.

Attending Cheerful Helpers was a brief period of our lives, but the impact has been lifelong.

Twenty (!) years later… I relish speaking about my family’s experience. Finding so much meaning in sharing our story, I have gone on to create music, lyrics, words – an actual MUSICAL about our family’s challenges. As my dad might say, “Who would’ve thunk it?”

This November, the musical will have its premier at Hollywood’s Hudson Theater. It has been a long and serpentine journey. It’s All Your Fault, Tyler Price! shows a family (based on my own) in the midst of learning challenges, behavioral problems and emotional rifts. After our young protagonist, 11-year-old Jackson, punches a middle-school bully in the face for teasing his big sister who has seizures, Jackson gets in big trouble. His plight leads him to present a scrappy, heartfelt musical in front of his school. He wants to let the world know what it’s been like to walk in his shoes.

For us, there is a direct path from parent group at Cheerful Helpers to a healthy marriage and life-sustaining sharing of feelings. Talking about the hard things has been the saving grace of our marriage. It has helped our nuclear family and our extended family. And it has now lead to a musical.

For those of you in these trenches of family struggles, I hope you will take advantage of all that Cheerful Helpers has to offer. And please join us at the Hudson Theater in November! More information is at tylerpricemusical.com.

Family Camp

Jaclyn Zeccola 

Play is how children develop a sense of self, it’s how they learn about their environment, and it’s how they express their inner world. In our work at Cheerful Helpers, we often think about
the children’s play to understand their development. As a family agency, we also strive to help parents to understand how play impacted their childhoods and how to play with their children. It can be so hard to actually play with a child, to follow their lead, to engage with curiosity and imagination, and to let go of your own ideas about how the play should go. We all struggle with having to swallow our anxiety when the playdoh is going from beautiful individual colors to a
brown blob, but the play, and connection, happens in the moments that you let these worries go.

In talking about this as a community, the idea of our summer Family Camp was born. Family camp is a time when parents and children come to camp together. There will be all of the hallmarks of a Cheerful Helpers approach. There will be narration from clinicians and interpretation about what might be getting hard. AND, there will be tie dye, and spin art, and mud cups, and water play, and maybe even GORP. It’s camp! It’s a time to be silly, have fun, and connect with each other and other families.

Our family camp this year is July 29-August 2, 2:00-5:00 pm. Please reach out to Sam Zarate, sam.zarate@cheerfulhelpers.org, to register or for more information.

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