Are Your Kids Missing, Too?

(Photo credit: parentingtweensandteens.com) Are Your Kids Missing, Too? I have three teenagers at home, and they all love their music. And Pinterest. And Wattpad, Tumblr, and YouTube. Phaedra* in particular, spent copious amounts of time on her device, binge watching shows on Netflix. A little red flag waved in my head. She had struggled with …

Week 13 Transitions in Marriage: In-Law Relations

This week we get to look at how our birth order affects the way we view money. I’m not sure if large families with people who are between the 2nd child and middle born and last born are just all considered middle born or if they can’t be classified. At any rate, I get to …

Week 12 Transitions in Marriage: Power Relations and Children

My husband and I have been married for 17 years. In that time, we’ve learned how to communicate far better with each other, in part because we’ve learned to love each other better. Russ is a dreamer; he’s a man with a vision and the world is just filled with possibilities. For me, reality rings …

Week 11 Transitions in Marriage: Fidelity and Physical Intimacy

These past couple of days, my husband has been out of town for work. We have a pipe leaking in the basement and we’ve put it off for months, but now that we’re selling the house, we need to fix it. One of the brothers from church offered to come over and look at the …

Week 10 Seek to Understand

In marriage we often bump up against each other in ways that are either easy to understand and move through or with problems that are perpetual and without resolution. John Gottman, Ph.D., calls these perpetual problems, and teaches in the Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work that they will always be there. The key is …

Week 09 Managing Conflict; Consecrating Ourselves

My kids like to watch a TV show called Oscar’s Oasis. It features Oscar, a little gecko, who is always fighting a trio of predators over the same object. The conflict comes because they want different things, e.g., the predator group wants an umbrella to serve as a satellite but Oscar is trying to use …

Week 08 Beware of Pride

From H. Wallace Goddard’s book Drawing Heaven into Your Marriage, I learned several elements of pride within myself that I hadn’t necessarily defined as such previously. The first sting was that “the natural man is inclined to love himself and fix others.” I find myself doing this with my children all the time. This is …

Week 7: Staying Emotionally Connected

There are marriages that are composed of two spouses that endure seemingly everything, especially each other. While staying together seems the top priority, they still are so apart from each other emotionally. One couple has a grieving wife, she lost her mother, and she’s checked out of life. She drinks when she’s not at work …

Week 06 Cherishing Your Spouse

In Goddard’s book Drawing Heaven into Marriage, he talks about the importance of sacrificing for one’s spouse. When Adam made sacrifices to the Lord, an angel came and asked him why he was doing it. He didn’t know, he just knew he had been commanded to do it and intended obedience no matter what. The …

Week 05 Behaviors that Negatively Affect Marriage

John M. Gottman, Ph.D. wrote a book called The Seven Principles for Making Marriages Work, and in it he goes about blasting marriage myths. How many times have you heard that the key to a good marriage is communication? How about sharing common interests keeping couples together? Others include avoiding conflict and going about it …