With children killing children, and the adults charged with their upbringing unable to recognize and head off the violence, the guidance of a professional counselor like Joyce Divinyi, M.S., may literally be life-saving.

The Peachtree City-based psychotherapist who calls herself first and foremost an advocate for children and then a trainer for parents and educators bases her message on her book, "Successful Strategies for Working or Living with Difficult Kids."

She will address an open community meeting May 23 in Peachtree City.

According to Divinyi, the old tried-and-true ways of punishing misconduct do not work today because the times are different. While parents and teachers like to begin from their own childhood's point of view "When we were growing up..." and "My parents would have..." today's children do not live in their parents' world.

Divinyi says the line between the adult world and the world of childhood no longer exists. Children and adolescents are exposed to all that is dangerous and deadly at the earliest ages and often know far more about activities like drug dealing and gun procurement than do the adults who are responsible for them.

The counselor believes tragedies like the Littleton, Paducah and Jonesboro killings could have been prevented if more adults were trained to recognize the signs and symptoms of the potentially dangerous child, because only then can positive changes in the behavior of the most "discipline resistant" child be brought about.

"Many teenagers today have a serious impairment in their ability to think about or manage intense emotions, especially violent emotions," Divinyi explains. "They live with a profound sense of `futurelessness' that impairs their ability to connect here and now actions with future consequences.

"When feelings are intense, thinking is impaired, and when feeling and thinking do not interact, then good decision-making doesn't happen," she says.

Divinyi has a private practice in individual and family therapy in Fayetteville, and is director of The Wellness Connection, a wellness and stress management training company. Nationally accredited as a behavioral and mental health counselor, her credentials include directorship of a residential treatment program for severely abused adolescent girls; training local and national Fortune 500 companies to deal with stress management, hostility and motivation; radio and television talk show discussions on issues like school safety, traumatized, violent and out-of-control children, and parenting.

Divinyi will speak at Christ Our Shepherd Lutheran Church Sunday, May 23, at 4 p.m., according to Dyann Roberts, who is coordinating the program. "Joyce will probably speak for 40 minutes or so, then take questions from the audience," Roberts said.

"She does not use scare tactics she presents truly successful strategies for working with challenging children," Roberts said, adding that while this opportunity is being sponsored by the church's support group ministry, Divinyi is not presenting a religious program. "This is for the entire community, parents, teachers, anyone concerned about children," she said.

There is no admission fee for this program. The church is on Ga. Highway 54 at Peachtree Parkway.