October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and it's easy to forget it's not just adults who can be affected by relationship violence.

At the YMCA of Greater Louisville, teens are learning how to create healthy connections through the Love Notes program based on a national curriculum.

The program is designed to teach teenagers relationship guidance and safety.

We think about domestic violence in marriages.

We don't think about it in dating violence.

If a person threatens to harm or even to kill themselves.

If you break up your life, you must you must reach out to your parents.

Your ex's parents.

Love Notes is an evidence based program.

It's a healthy relationships curriculum.

So it teaches teens and young adults about healthy relationships.

That includes sexual risk avoidance things, but also things like domestic violence.

How to break up, how to know yourself so that you can be in a relationship Better Stay.

Away from the revenge game not to protect you don't fit in with.

The statistics are very alarming when it comes to dating violence, especially for teens.

What are the statistics?

Is like one in three in their lifetime.

We'll experience it versus one in 12 in the past year.

And so, like if you think about one in three and then you look at a room of 20 teens like that's like six of them.

Are we stand together, we break up.

We normally have a couple of lessons each day, so 2 to 3 lessons every day.

And then in the afternoon we spend some time in the teen tech center.

And during that time they do things like podcasting, they record music videos, they create social media graphics, get we have three sex lessons that are at the end.

So there's the one that we consider the body lessons.

So that's the informative facts about STDs, pregnancy, all of that kind of stuff.

And then we have the heart lesson, which is more about like how sex impacts your relationships or how it can impact your relationships.

Know my schools, but don't talk about that.

But it's really important to learn.

So that's why I'm here.

Like I, I count this as a school.

Like it's really something important that teens in my age and older and under willing should be willing to learn about.

I've been here for three years and I've never gotten bored.

This is really entertaining.

And the more I come in, the more stuff I learn before I feel like I had a decent amount of knowledge about what we're learning about that.

But now that I know so much more and it's so much more helpful because I know once I get into a relationship, I know what to look for, and that can be relationships with anyone like your mother, your coach, your neighbor, your boyfriend, girlfriend, this and that.

It doesn't have to be only for boyfriend and girlfriend.

I think teens are left out of the conversation around domestic violence because I think it's hard for us adults to think that it's happening to teens.

And so I think some of it's the terminology thing, but also I think that adults are just scared, I guess, to to think that it's happening to their kids.

So this is like the second time that my daughter signed up.

I was interested in doing it because I teach a lot about relationships not only within her self but also within her family, her friends and the community as well.

Relationships is something that they develop each and every day.

And at the start, when they're younger, some of it is violent from home and some of us learn from other friends.

It's just I'll how you know, their environment that they involved in is how they pick up on what relationship that they grow into.

With relationships starting younger and the emotional maturity not necessarily being there.

I sometimes I don't think that they know any different and they haven't really seen any different in So a program like Love Notes where we can talk about communication skills, we can talk about what a healthy relationship actually looks like.

It doesn't look like what you see on Instagram and TikTok and music videos and things like that.

If we can show them healthy examples, then hopefully they're more likely to have those healthy relationships versus unhealthy relationships.