Daly Focus Blog
Isn’t summer great? It’s the season for family vacations, blooming flowers, patriotic celebrations, and best of all – weddings. June, July, and August continue to be the most popular months to get married.
Maybe you’re like me in that whenever I have the privilege of witnessing a man and a woman exchange vows, I can’t help but wonder what their future holds. Will their love gradually deepen? What challenges will they face? Where will they be in five, ten, or fifty years?
A lot of people assume it’s their circumstances that determine their attitude. But that’s really not the case. It’s actually quite the opposite.
Let me tell you about Christy and Debra. I think their stories illustrate the point well.
Christy is in her thirties. She’s college educated and ambitious, but with the economy struggling, she started cleaning houses to make ends meet. One of her daily tasks is scrubbing toilets. She hates it. From her view, she deserves better.
Today’s post comes courtesy of Glenn Stanton, Focus on the Family’s director of Family Formation Studies.
A new study from the University of Melbourne in Australia on how kids from same-sex homes fare is getting a good deal of press. Perhaps you’ve seen the news stories and wondered if this changes the nature of the debate over the importance of the family?
It does not.
This new study gives the same kind of findings we’ve seen before, coming from the same kinds of studies with the same kinds of serious short-comings and method problems.
Life just keeps moving faster and faster for all of us.
With jobs and kids and all that goes into running a household, daily life can be difficult to balance.
Fortunately, there are a couple of ways to make that task a little easier.
The first idea comes from my friend and former Focus board member, Al Mohler. Like most of us, he leads a busy life. And it was busy in the early years of his family as well.
I often hear from folks who want to reprioritize their lives. They just don’t know how.
I get it.
The world is moving faster and growing more hectic for all of us. It’s easy to feel pressured to do it all. From our jobs and the bills to school plays and soccer practice, everything seems important. But all that busyness leaves us with crumbs of time to scrape together for family and friends, and, yes, even God.
Every so often it’s good to get little reminders that serve as something of a reset button for what’s truly important in life.
I recently experienced that when a colleague of mine shared some thoughts he found online from a palliative care nurse.
As you can imagine, when each work day is spent caring for folks in the final weeks of their lives, the subject matter tends to dip below the surface to what’s truly meaningful.
In a previous blog post, I wrote about passing along a faith that lasts to your children. That post focused on the most important thing parents can do: live out a vibrant faith themselves.
Today I want to share with you additional research that suggests another helpful dimension to helping your kids inherit your faith.
As it turns out, that element has a lot to do with Dad.
The power of love and affection
In a New York Times article that ran earlier this year, Prof.
The headline certainly draws you in: “Don’t Call Me Grandma: Births to ‘Older’ Moms on the Rise.” The report from NBC News highlights the growing trend of women over age 35 who are having their first baby.
Delaying pregnancy has become the new normal, and there are many reasons why this is so. First of all, men and women are both marrying at an older age. Another reason is many people – most markedly, women – are pursuing college or advanced degrees that pressure them to dedicate time to developing their careers instead of starting a family.
Since 2008, 2,774 families have initiated the process of adoption from foster care as a result of the collaborative efforts of our Wait No More program. It’s been amazing for us to see that many of these families are choosing to adopt hard-to-place kids like older children, sibling groups or those with special needs.
Results like this are the reason why the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute has named Wait No More a national best practice in foster care adoption recruitment.
Stepfamilies exist for different reasons. Sometimes as a result of marriage after divorce… sometimes because of a marriage after the death of a spouse. Sometimes the stepfamily happens because a baby or child born out-of-wedlock creates a blended family after the marriage takes place.
Whatever the reason, we know this is true: in addition to the issues all families face – the sibling rivalry, economic issues, the occasional spat – stepfamilies often have some added challenges to overcome.
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.
