Parenting

I once here a mommy blogger say that parenting is not something that you do if you have time for, it is what god gave you time for. Now day’s people are really busy. They spend their time running from jobs to daycare to parties and so one. Without even realizing they have made parenting a thing that they do when it is convenient instead of spending their time making sure that their children always come first. Many parents would do well to take a step back from work, friends and personal pleasure and spend that time on their children. They might even find that they learn more in this processes.  

Learning is a Choice

This week I read an article by Dennis Prager entitled Does a Women Trade Her Mind for a Mop. I loved this article. Many people now days think that be a isn't just useless and mind numbering, but also degrading as well. They think that there education is useless and they stop learning because of their environment that they are in. This is completely false. Learning is a choice. Someone can go to work for five years and learn the same about as someone that stays at home. It all depends on how they spend their time. A stay at home mom can spend her time listening to books while she does many things such as cleaning and folding laundry. This isn't always as easy for someone that goes to work every day. 

Family Council

Communication in a family is very important. One of the best ways to have open communication is to have weekly family council. It is important that you have are making an agenda throughout the week. That way there is nothing that is forgotten. One of the best ways is to post it somewhere where all of the family members have access to it. The next step is to make sure that you show love and appreciation for each other. This encourages open communication with one another. Everyone in the family knows that they are cared for and have that there opinion has value. The next step is to make sure that you have an opening prayer. This invites the spirit and helps you know what the lords will is. Next is to start the discussion. It is important that everyone comes to a consensus, before a decision is finalized. Next you need to say a closing prayer so that you can express gratitude. Last is to have some way that we can all become better friends. This can be done through lots of ways like refreshments.     

Family Crisis

In this week of family relations we learned about family crisis and family stress. Every family at some point will face family crisis and family stressors. It is not so important what the crisis and stress is, but rather who we react to the family stress or crisis. In a family crisis there is something that is called the abc/e model. A is the actual event. B is the both of their resources. C is their cognition. X is the total experience. The actual event isn't as big of a deal. Main this is because there is nothing that you can do about it. With resources the most important thing with is not what resources that they have, but how they use their resources. Cognition is how they are metal handling the situation. The most important thing with x is that at the end they are pulling together. Crisis can actual have a way of pulling a couple together.  

Not Yet

Now day’s sexual intimacy is such an interesting subject. There are many good people that would avoid the topic at all cost and then there are others that can seem to talk about it enough. This has made it very confusing for some teenagers. The media seems to shove try and shove sex down their throats every chance that they get. Many good parents have some great concern about this. So to combat this message that everyone should be having sex they send many warns to their teenagers about all of the dangers of sex. The problem with this is many of teenage become sacred of sex. They think that it is dirt and if they do it they too will become dirt. This becomes a problem when the teenagers get married and now it is okay. They have lots of martial problem because they don’t want to be dirty people. We need to be more careful about how we teach are teens. We need to teach them not yet instead of no.     

Marriages vs Weddings

This week in Family Relations we learned about transitioning into marriage. I find it interesting that people will spend many hours and lot of money on their wedding and then once they are married they think that everything is down and that they know longer need to spend time or money on their marriage, I think that if people but in the same about of effort into their marriage that they did with their wedding then there would be a big difference in the rate of divorces. People would know and appreciate their partner. They wouldn't feel the need to get divorced. If there was a problem the couple would be putting in enough time to work it out. People need to remember that if they aren’t putting time and energy into their marriage, then their marriage is slowly disengaging. 

Dating

This week in my class we have been learning a lot about dating and preparation for marriage. We spent a lot of time learning about how dating has changed over the years.  The difference between dating and courting is something that we have lost over the years that I think our culture desperately needs to get back. We use to go on dates (with many of the same people at once), start courting (our dating now days), engagement and marriage. Our culture use to spend a lot of time in the first stage and quite a bit of time on the second stage. Then fairly little time on the second two stages. My generation does almost the exact opposite. We spend very little time dating, sometimes we don’t even spend any time dating. Instead we just hang out for a few weeks. We become couples really quick after we meet. We then get engaged fairly fast. Then before we now it we are married and all of these problems arise. This is because people really don’t know who they have married and what to expect. We also haven’t learned what it is like to be really committed to each other. There is a reason that the prophet and apostles keep telling us to date more. Now all we need to do is listen.