Our Responsibility

    
          Now obviously as parents and family members we have lots of responsibilities. But one that we discussed this week that is one of the greatest we will have is teaching our children about intimacy. That can be kind of an awkward subject, I think we all agree. I still remember my young women leaders would always get all uncomfortable and awkward when that subject would come up in the lesson manual. It is such a personal and private thing that it may be hard to communicate to our children. But we talked in class about how absolutely essential it is to be open with our children. My professor is a marriage and family therapist and he said he remembers counseling a young girl who had some issues, I think she had gotten pregnant maybe, and the parents said that they just didn't want to expose her to anything so they didn't say anything. Well, my professor told them, someone did expose her. And thats what we talked about in class; our children are going to be exposed to sex somehow. We have to take the initiative to make sure our children are finding out about it in the right context, with the right understanding. This includes creating and maintaining an open relationship with our children, so that they can feel comfortable asking us questions and telling us things they might have heard and not understood. This includes being able to talk about any abuse they might have experienced or pornography they might have been exposed to. A man in our class told us that at the age of 6 he had an older boy approach him with a lot of pornography and show it to him. SIX YEARS OLD! This isn't something we can just ignore because it's uncomfortable. We have to be deliberate in teaching our children truths. Help them understand, from a very young age, about modesty and pictures of inappropriately dressed women. Even taking your 4 year old to the grocery store exposes them to pornography just with the magazine racks. We cannot, must not, ignore the fact that our entire world is sexualized and that our children will be facing it on all sides. We need to be teaching them that intimacy is appropriate and good within the bonds of sacred marriage. They need to know how to turn away from inappropriate images, books, movies, music, etc. They need to know the dangers they can face as they start dating and becoming physical with members of the opposite sex. They need to know that others shouldn't be touching them inappropriately and that they should come talk to their parents if anyone does touch them.
Someone will teach your children about sex. Will you make sure that it is you? Or will you let it be the next door neighbor kid, or the pornographic magazine someone shows them at school, or the older adult who abuses them? As Sister Beck taught us today in a regional RS fireside, we need to be intentional about what we allow in our home and what we teach our children. We are the protectors of our homes and we need to act as such.
Definitely an idea that I have been asking myself since this last week. I'll have to get over the awkwardness. Cause really my children are worth dealing with a little of uncomfortable discussions.

And Then There Were Three...

      Children... Children add a whole new dimension to life, don't they? To everyone's lives. But especially adding your child to your family and making that whole new life changing situation your reality... thats definitely a new dimension.
      The discussion this week was about how children change your marriage relationship. It was quite the discussion. There obviously is such a difference when you bring a child in to be a part of the family that you and your spouse created. Especially with the first child. In talking about it in class, it was just so crazy to think about. I mean, I think that I have thought a lot about marriage and being prepared for that and making sure you are working on your marriage relationship and all of those things. I think I've thought a lot about what raising kids will be like. I watch my sister and sisters-in-law and I think... wow, okay, I am quite grateful to be single and childless right now! :) I mean, I know how kids are. Obviously I don't know how it is to be the mother of the children and I don't yet know how my children will be, but I'm just saying, it's something that I have considered a lot. But what I haven't considered is making the actual transition between the two of you being married to the three of you trying to figure out a new family life.
      I think it's kind of like dance. If you've ever been in a dance class before you know that often when you are being taught the dance, you will be taught one sequence, with 2 or 3 moves in it, and then another sequence that follows right after with another 2 or 3 moves in it.  And often when you are getting taught, you think, okay, yeah this isn't that hard. I can do this, no problem. But it's when you try putting those two different sequences together that you start to get problems. You have to not only know the sequences, but you have to know the transitions. You have to know how the weight changes are and where you put your feet as you move from one sequence to another. But once you get that transition down, the whole step fits together pretty well. Well, I think that is how adding a child to a marriage is. You know how your marriage works, you feel comfortable with each other and how the relationship is progressing and where you need to work on things or communicate more and where you get along really well. You know all these things. And while you may not know much about having children, you know that it's what you need to be doing and you know that things will work out. And you might have a small idea at least of how your spouse interacts with children. But it is that transition from one stage of life to the next that might slow you down. You have to figure out where the time changes are (like no sleep!) and where you have to give a little here and take a little more there. You may have to find a whole new way of communicating with your spouse because you have a whole new thing to be communicating about. Your lives change drastically and everything you thought you knew about the relationship you had, has suddenly turned upside down.
       Now all of that probably sounds pretty bleak... it did to me when my teacher was discussing this all in class. I was thinking, geeze, there's no way to not be totally freaking out and miserable when you first have a child. But of course, that wasn't the purpose of the class and we started talking about things you can do to help keep your marriage going well during this transition so that you two can still be happy and so that you can be good parents. So I'm just going to include the list here:

--Start from the beginning to involve the father in the process of raising this child. Often husbands complain that they feel left out and ignored by their wives when this new little baby comes. A lot of that comes from the way in which the pregnancy and baby is handled. Obviously some of that is just part of life, but some can be controlled.The mother has an automatic opportunity to bond with the child, seeing as she is actually carrying the child for nine months. Also, if she breastfeeds after the baby is born, she has hormones releasing in her body that continue to help her connect with this baby. By the forces of nature, men obviously don't have these experiences. They don't just happen for men. So be conscious about having the father involved; make sure he attends doctor appointments, have him feel the baby when it's kicking, even having him talk to the baby. And when the baby is born, allow the father to do all that he can. We talked about girls who simply think 'well I can do it better then you, you just don't even know enough to raise this child.' If he doesn't know as much, teach him. Let him try and sometimes fail. After all, don't we all make mistakes? Invite him into this process of raising this child. Don't just let him be/ make him be on the outskirts of this experience.
-- Set aside time that you will talk with each other, decide to make that a priority. Talk with each other about the child and their needs so that you can both be equally involved.
--Realize that there are going to be huge life changes coming your way once the little one enters your lives. Talk about what those changes may be and how you want to handle them. Determine have open communication with each other as you go through this life change.
--Spend time both with the baby and some one-on-one time. It is good to bond with the baby, obviously, and to spend some quality family time together. But don't put your relationship off. Remember that if you put yourselves on the back burner, that is only going to inhibit you from being a good parent in the future, and will therefore hurt the child. So make sure your time together is still important.
--Be considerate of the extra strain that will be placed on both of you. Realize that most likely neither of you know how to do this, and you're both going to be feeling a lot of pressure and stress as you consider being the one responsible for this little one for the rest of forever. Thats a big deal and can really affect people.
--And finally, work on communication and building your relationship before you consider having children. Those couples who had good relationships with healthy communication and interaction before the baby was born had higher levels of marital satisfaction after the baby came. (That one sort of makes sense you know...)
Anyway, this post ended up being super long. But I just really appreciated the things I learned in class this week. I'm grateful to know these things before I'm even headed in to marriage... not saying that I'll be really good at doing all these things, but at least I have a chance of doing a few of them that might help, as opposed to not knowing any at all like I did only about a week ago!
As always, thanks for listening!

L.O.V.E

                                       

I decided I needed a picture this week... blog posts are just so boring without pictures. So I typed in 'dating pictures' to google and I just love that this was the first one to come up. 'ahh, it's just so romantic, us holding this rose and smelling it together. And don't forget the wind blowing my hair.'
           Needless to say, this week we talked about falling in love and dating. And it was interesting to talk about some of the 'ideals' of dating and courtship... some of which this picture suggests. Often we grow up thinking it's all roses and love songs and staring into each others eyes. But our class discussion obviously brought up more than just googlie eyes when you are considering dating and/or marrying someone. We talked of course about finances, religion, family backgrounds, personalities, etc. There are just so many aspects to forming a lasting relationship with someone. So it is interesting to me that anyone actually finds someone to settle down with, with all these things to find someone with whom you are compatible. It's like you could go on forever, searching for the perfect person. So it just catches my interest that although there are all these things to look for and agree upon, people still find each other every day and end up happy. (Which doesn't mean they avoid conflict...)
     One of the most interesting things that I thought from this week's discussion is that our textbook encourages couples to be financially and personally secure before entering into a marriage. This advice, however, is in direct conflict with revelation we have received from God. Through His prophets God has  told us that we need to do things on His time schedule and things will work out. Anyone read any talks by President Kimball lately? Well, technically I haven't either... ;)... but I do know that he often talks about the issues of young couples waiting to get married or start a family until they are financially and otherwise stable. Now obviously those things are very personal choices that we each make with the Lord, but I just was interested that according to these professionals, we should be waiting to get married. Good thing we have a direct line to the Lord to know His will, huh?
      The other point I found interesting was that research done on cohabiting couples shows that they have higher divorce rates, lower sexual satisfaction, higher instances of abuse, and higher costs on substance abuse. Crazy, huh? I feel like everyone is pushing the whole 'try living together first, it's smarter' thing when in reality, marriage is better for a lot of reasons. Which, again, isn't news to us, but I am always fascinated with science finally catches up with revelation. I guess it's the process of faith... you have faith in something until you have a sure knowledge. And with some of these things, like believing marriage is better than living together (not that I ever questioned this, mind you, I'm just sayin...), you just have faith that what the prophets tell you is true, don't live together, make that commitment and get married first. Well in about the 80's, social scientists were telling people to cohabit first, it was the way to lower divorce rates. But the prophets always spoke the mind of the Lord and of course we are commanded against doing such things, even if the research seems to suggest we should. And then, what do you know, several years later, research catches up and we find a lot of negative consequences to cohabiting. I just love when this happens :) It happened with the word of wisdom and even with fasting--medical researchers have found that it is good for your body to go without food or drink for a day, once a month, to kind of help reset the system. Isn't the gospel great stuff??? Love it!

Men vs. Women

     Okay so this week the topic was gender roles. Just for a definition, "gender roles refer to the behavior associated with being either male or female."-- quote from my textbook. So, gender roles. We all know that they are out there; women cook, men work. Women clean, men fix cars. Women take care of the children, men take care of the trash. Obviously those are some of the more traditional ones. But it seems they still stick today. Not in such definitive, hard and fast lines, but they still exist. It is more unusual to see a 'Mr. Mom' husband and a breadwinner wife then it is to see a traditional stay-at-home mom and a career driven father. Or probably more accurately, two career-driven parents with the wife who still comes home to cook dinner and tuck the kids in more often then her husband does. Why is this? Why have these traditional roles held out in our country for so long? Obviously we as Latter-Day Saints have our own belief about such roles. We believe that gender is eternal and that it is the role of the father to be the presider and provider in the home. We also believe it is the mother's role to be the primary nurturer of the children (see The Family: A Proclamation to the World; http://lds.org/family/proclamation?lang=eng). Now, that doesn't mean that there isn't some flexibility in that; men can definitely nurture their children and women may choose to have a career. But we still believe these roles of men and women to be divinely appointed. But doesn't it seem strange that people all over this country and other parts of the world hold this same general idea? Why is it that women are almost always the ones found in charge of the children, even if they also have a career? With such a forward and intense movement by the feminists to make everything absolutely equal, why hasn't that caught on yet? Why don't men take more of nurturing part of raising children? Why don't women go out there and make all that money in the corporate world? Again, there are many men and women who do do those things. They don't fall into the traditional roles. But often women and men do fit right into those roles. How has that stuck for so many thousands of years? I believe it is because it is inherent in us. Gender is eternal, as stated earlier, and some of the gender roles have been established by God. Therefore it is inherent within our very natures to be the nurturers or the providers.
       We watched a video for class one day that talked all about this. It was a news report, like 20/20 or something like that, about how girls and boys just seem to be different. They have different interests and different likes. For example, some of the parents that were interviewed talked about how they never allowed their boys to have weapons. They didn't have toy guns, swords, or anything else. They felt strongly that they "were not going to be the ones to arm [their] children." But somehow, those boys managed to turn their carrot sticks into guns and their sister's barbie dolls into swords. It was just the way that they were. This video is filled with tons of examples like this, that there just is something biologically different in the way boys and girls think. I loved this video because it basically was saying everything that the Proclamation says and proved the things that The Brethren have been teaching us all along. We are different, and that is okay. I'm sure you've all heard the analogy of the airplane: the right wing is completely opposite in design and shape from the left wing, but together they make the airplane fly. It couldn't fly with just the left or the the right, nor could it fly with two left wings or two right wings.  Men and women were created differently so that they could compliment each other, not so that they could be above or better than one another.
         Thanks for listening! (I don't have a link for the video of the 20/20 report, so I can't post it. Although it's almost an hour long so you all probably wouldn't have time to watch it anyway!)