In a time when many adults feel unsure how to connect with the young people in their lives, two Ohio Valley counselors are inviting the community to sit down, listen, and start a conversation.
The Bridge the Gap: Saturday Series at Wheeling Country Day School was created to help parents, teachers, coaches, and mentors better understand the world kids and teenagers are navigating today. Rather than offering a traditional parenting seminar, the series focuses on something simpler and often harder: meaningful connection.
The sessions take place on select Saturdays throughout the spring and are led by licensed professional counselors Kylie Hohman and Ashlee Heberger-Jividen, who both work with preteens and teens throughout the Ohio Valley.
Their goal is not to lecture adults about what they should be doing. Instead, they want to help adults better understand what young people are actually experiencing, and what they wish the adults around them knew.
From Counseling Rooms to a Community Conversation
Ashlee Heberger-Jividen moved to the area in 2016 and became deeply involved in the community, including serving as the head volleyball coach at The Linsly School. Professionally, she began working with The Process, a local counseling practice, in 2022. She now sees preteens and teens ages 10 and up and works closely with families across the region. Her husband is also an educator at Wheeling Country Day School, further rooting her in the school community.
For Heberger-Jividen, counseling was always meant to extend beyond an office, as she always envisioned something more community-based.
Her colleague Kylie Hohman shared a similar journey. Hohman joined The Process in 2019 after working at Linsly for four years, where she helped build and develop the school’s mental health services. Early in her career, she knew she wanted to work with teens and young adults and discovered she had a particular strength in crisis management. Private practice was never her original goal. “I honestly didn’t know if I was skilled enough,” she recalled with a laugh.
But years of working with students revealed a larger need: many adults simply don’t have the tools or language to understand what young people are going through.
Listening to What Kids Actually Want to Talk About
Before launching the series, Kylie and Ashee did something many adult-led programs overlook. They asked students directly what they wanted adults to understand.
They surveyed high school and middle school students across the region, asking a simple question: What do you actually want adults to hear? The responses helped shape the entire structure of the series.
Instead of focusing on what adults believe kids need to hear, the conversations center on what young people say they wish adults understood. One theme surfaced again and again: connection. Students consistently expressed a desire to feel more understood by the adults in their lives and not only parents, but also teachers, coaches, mentors, and other trusted adults.
The series is designed to strengthen those relationships.
Topics explore how adults can better recognize when something might be wrong, how to start conversations that teens will actually engage in, and how tools like active listening can change the dynamic between adults and young people.
Not a Parenting Class
One of the most important distinctions the counselors make is that the series is not a parenting class. “We’re not teaching parenting skills,” Hohman explained. “We’re teaching ways to connect.” Instead of offering rigid instructions or step by step formulas, the sessions focus on understanding perspective and helping adults step into the world children and teens are experiencing today.
Participants are encouraged to ask questions, share experiences, and take part in open discussion rather than passively listening to a lecture. The atmosphere is intentionally informal, with organizers hoping it feels more like a conversation than a classroom. As Ashlee put it, “We want it to feel like a conversation.”
A School Opening Its Doors to the Community
Wheeling Country Day School hosts the Saturday series as part of its broader commitment to community engagement. The school’s motto “It’s Possible Here” reflects its mission to support learning both inside and outside the classroom.
To make the event accessible to families, the school also incorporates local artists and kid-friendly activities during the sessions so that both adults and children can attend.
The goal is to remove barriers that might prevent caregivers from participating.
Time is always the biggest challenge for families, the organizers acknowledge, which is why the sessions are scheduled on Saturday mornings. As the series continues to evolve, virtual options may also become available to reach an even wider audience in the future.
A Growing Impact
Ultimately, the Bridge the Gap series represents something larger than a workshop. For these two women, it is about expanding the reach of the work they do every day in counseling sessions and helping adults and young people understand each other a little better. When stronger connections form between kids and the adults who support them, the ripple effects reach classrooms, teams, families, and entire communities.
The next session will take place on March 21 from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. at Wheeling Country Day School, 8 Park Road in Wheeling. RSVP on the website or just show up with your kiddos! This month’s artist is Tim Thompson from Oglebay Institute paired with a social media and peer dynamics chat facilitated by Kylie and Ashlee!
