Daly Focus Blog
What’s your EQ?
Your IQ is a measure of your intelligence. Your EQ is a measure of your “emotional intelligence.”
The term was coined in 1995 by Daniel Goleman, who first applied the concept to businessmen and women. He described emotional intelligence as the degree to which you understand your own emotions, the emotions of others, and can make healthy relational choices as a result. The concept eventually spilled outside the business world into other arenas.
As we head into the long Thanksgiving weekend and the official start of the holiday season, I wanted to share a list of ten of the top family-friendly Christmas films with you. This list was compiled by my friend and colleague Bob Waliszewski and his PluggedIn crew.
Sitting down together as a family to watch a movie can be a fun way to unwind. Films can also help us communicate values and truths to our kids.
Week Ending November 19th
Take Your Life Back (Stephen Arterburn & David Stoop)
Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story (Ben Carson, MD)
8 Simple Tools for Raising Great Kids (Dr. Todd Cartmell)
10 Things a Husband Needs from His Wife (Erin Smalley)
All the Colors of Christmas Advent Calendar
How to Stop the Past from Controlling Your Future (Stephen Arterburn & David Stoop)
Upside Down Prayers for Parents (Lisa T. Bergren)
Adventures in Odyssey Children’s Bible
Under Our Skin (Benjamin Watson)
You Have a Brain (Ben Carson, MD)
Swipe Right (Levi Lusko)
The Sacred Search (Gary Thomas)
Adventures in Odyssey: Advent Activity Calendar
Adventures in Odyssey: Countdown to Christmas Advent Collection
Standing in the Fire (Tom Doyle)
Enjoy!: The Gift of Sexual Pleasure for Women (Cliff & Joyce Penner)
Raising Kids of Character (Dr.
If I handed a baby to you, the infant would likely snuggle face first into your shoulder for comfort.
That’s not how it was with my colleague John Fuller’s youngest son. They adopted him when he was nine months old. Even as a baby, he would physically turn away when he was held. He’d accept chest-to-chest and back-to-chest snuggles, but never face-to-face.
That’s how deep attachment issues in adopted children can run. Many children who have lost their parents in some fashion suffer from a sense of rejection and lack of emotional connection that reaches to their soul.
Marital relationship studies generally examine the factors that contribute to the downfall of a marriage. One revolutionary study took an opposite approach. It followed 373 happy, successful couples for 22 years and looked at what went right.
One of the pivotal conclusions the study reached was that couples enjoyed higher marital satisfaction when wives affirmed their husbands. That’s a simple enough premise, but it can be surprisingly difficult for many women to do.
Christian women desire to be good wives and desire to connect with their husbands.
“Why should I focus on my past? It’s over. I can’t change anything about it.”
Answer: If your past still affects your present, it’s not really in the past.
Wounds from our past can imprison us within ourselves. Satan is a master at dredging up old hurts and using them against us. Sinful and dysfunctional behavior today is often in reaction to the pain that litters our yesterdays.
Guilt, shame, bitterness, resentment, and anger are a long, slow path to destruction.
Several years ago, I asked whether or not you thought pets went to Heaven.
The response was robust!
Personally, I’ve always appreciated how Dr. Billy Graham responded to that question:
“God will prepare everything for our perfect happiness, and if it takes my dog being there, I believe he’ll be there.”
But today I thought I’d ask a less eternally minded question, but a practical one nonetheless:
What’s the best family dog?
According to the American Kennel Club, here are the ten best:
1.
What can you do tonight to deepen your relationship with your children and empower them to develop strong character?
Simply this: in a genuine way that fits you and your child, make an effort to connect. It doesn’t have to be expensive, complicated, or excessively time-consuming. Even the simplest gesture of love, affection, and physical touch can strengthen the relationship between a parent and a child.
That advice comes from clinical child psychologist, Dr. Todd Cartmell, my guest on our Focus on the Family Broadcast “Raising Kids of Character.” He’ll be providing equally helpful answers to questions that many parents ask:
How do I get my children to listen to me?
John Murphy was on a routine training jump at Fort Bragg when it happened.
He’d just gotten home from a deployment to Afghanistan a couple of months before. John was a proud soldier who was so eager to serve, he dropped out of a full Army ROTC scholarship at Michigan State so he could go straight into active duty.
John grew up with godly parents who loved the Lord and who loved him. But he was a nominal Christian at best.
It’s been said it’s “easier to build a boy than to mend a man.” I agree. So how do we build the next generation of boys into men?
John Wooden was the men’s basketball coach at UCLA for nearly thirty years and is widely recognized as one of the greatest coaches in the history of the game. The dominance of his teams remains unprecedented into the modern era.
Surprisingly, though, his lessons on the court had more to do with being a man than with basketball.
Jim Daly is a husband, father and President of Focus on the Family and host of its National Radio Hall of Fame broadcast. His blog, Daly Focus, is full of timely commentary and wisdom designed to help you navigate and understand today’s culture. His latest book is Marriage Done Right.
