Creating Your Forever

I read an amazing article that was written by “The Children’s Bureau” that was titled “A Fathers impact of Child Development.” It discussed the impact that a father has on a child’s life by focusing on 3 points: facts about a father's engagement, father absence, and tips for dads. Today in my blog I wanted to talk a bit about 5 things that stood out to me as I read the article. Infants can be equally as attached to the father as they are the mother. The first thing that caught my attention is that the article said that fathers and infants can be equally as attached as mothers and infants. This was interesting to me because I feel like there is an idea that a mother and her baby have a connection that is hard to recreate with the father but when both parents are involved with the child, infants are attached to both parents from the beginning of life. Father involvement using authoritative parenting (loving and with clear boundaries and expectations) leads to better emotion

In a marriage, balancing work and family life can be difficult. On one hand, there is the need and desire to work, earn money, and provide for your family, but on the other hand, there is the need to spend time with your family, creating bonds, building connections, and being there for each other. There are many different ideas taught in today's world about how we should balance our work and family life. It is important that we always remember to keep our priorities straight and remember what is important in life, which is why in today's blog, I wanted to talk about managing finances and budgeting, and paying off debt. Finances play a big role in the family. According to a BYU article titled Managing Family Finances, "Money management is critical to the success and happiness of any relationship, including your marriage. The Family: A Proclamation to the World states that parents have a sacred duty to provide for their children's physical needs. Money management is a k

In every relationship we have, whether with a friend, a coworker, a boss, a boyfriend/girlfriend, or a spouse, the way we communicate and solve our problems is important. According to Yellin Law, 65% of people said that communication issues were at the top of their list of reasons for divorce. A related conflict was the couple's inability to work together to problem solve and resolve conflict with 43% of people putting it as number 2 on their list. With this being such a big issue, I wanted to talk today about how we can better communicate and problem-solve in our relationships. One of the best things we can do for our relationships is learn to communicate. The first part of communicating that is important is learning how to listen. Three types of listening are reflective, empathic, and active. In reflective listening, the listener tries to understand what the person is saying by clarifying and restating what is being said. This method helps increase the listener's understandi

Facing the Challenges of Family Life There are all kinds of different families and all kinds of different challenges a family goes through. It can be difficult at times to navigate through those challenges and sometimes those challenges cause changes in the dynamic of a family, rather for better or for worse. There is a quote that I love that says, "The same boiling water that softens the potato hardens the egg. It's about what we're made out of, not the circumstances." In life, we will go through hard things, but it all depends on how we take it. We can let our hard times turn us cold and bitter and let them pull apart our family or we can learn from them and let them build up and strengthen our family. Which one do you choose with your family? Today I wanted to talk a bit about the life cycle of a family, the impacts of family crises, and ways we can grow closer to our families during hard times. The life cycle of a family is the stages and processes that a famil

intro: After marriage, physical intimacy between a man and a woman can be a difficult thing. Before marriage, we may have expectations of what our sex life will be like with our spouse, and those expectations are rarely met. In this blog post, I wanted to go over some of the differences between men and women when it comes to physical intimacy, the differences between unhealthy sex and healthy sex in marriage, and some ways to improve your intimate relationship with your spouse. Differences Between Men and Women When you are newly married, it can be tricky to navigate your newfound sexual life. What makes it even harder, is naturally we already have some things that are different between us and our spouse that we have to work through and figure out. The first thing that is different is the cycles of a woman's and a man's sex drive. For a woman, libido often changes with a menstrual cycle. During ovulation, a woman's sex drive matches a man's but throughout other phase

The Wedding & Adjusting to Married Life Wedding So your significant other has finally popped the question (Or you popped the question)!! An engagement brings feelings of love and excitement but also can bring stress as wedding planning begins. There are many decisions that need to be made such as the budget, the logistics of the wedding, where the wedding will take place, music and food, who is invited, sending out the invites, finding a photographer, choosing wedding colors, and buying a wedding dress and suit. That is a lot to plan! Today in the United States, weddings tend to be big and elaborate affairs. There are even professional wedding planners that can be hired to make your wedding planning easier. But even with a wedding planner, a wedding is likely going to be expensive. In 2009, the average cost for a wedding was $27,800. Oftentimes, the pressure of planning the wedding is placed on the bride and her family and this can sometimes cause tension between the couple and