Posts Tagged ‘children’
Sleeping our way to a better marriage
Sleep deprivation is a recognised means of torture. But what about when the cause is one of our children? In this post we explore how we might sleep our way to a better marriage. Our granddaughter is three months old. She is pure delight and we are loving being Nonnina and Nonno. Naturally her parents…
Read MoreThe Rise of the Fur Baby
Fur babies: substitute child, family asset or living therapy doll? In this blog we discuss some different views on the rise of the Fur Baby culture. For years, our daughter pleaded with us for a dog – every birthday, every Christmas, the same earnest plea. And for years, we had our stock reply: “We’d have another baby before…
Read MoreEmbracing a Pro-Life Heart
As we celebrate Grandparents Day on July 27, we’re reminded of the profound role we play in nurturing a culture of life within our families. For us, being pro-life isn’t just about supporting the movement through donations and attending rallies – though those efforts matter. It’s about how we live every day, especially in our…
Read MoreLeaving and Cleaving is Complicated!
Origin Families and their Impact “A man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” (Gen 2:24) On our wedding day, we joyfully left our family homes to begin our married life together. Living and worshipping in the same parish, with similar ethnic heritage and family structure,…
Read MoreAttachment Style and Marriage
Our earliest experiences of love and care profoundly influence what we each bring into our marriage. Attachment Theory illuminates how. As infants, we are completely dependent on our parents for basic physical needs like food and clothing. We also rely on them to provide affection, stimulation and soothing of distress. Research shows that the rapid…
Read MoreNatural Fertility
True love cannot be contained; it always gives life in some form, bursting forth from the couple with irrepressible urgency. For most couples, this life-giving impulse will result in the biological birth of a child. For others, it will be expressed in a shared effort to generously give of their time and talents to others.…
Read MoreThe Family Models Synodality
Only two of our five children, now adults, still reside with us. As resident adults, we respect their right to make decisions about their personal life, but we also impose some house rules. For example, we require them to communicate about their movements, tidy their rooms, do their own laundry, and participate in the preparation…
Read MoreForward Planning your Family Planning
Some years ago, I (Francine) was teaching a couple fertility awareness. They had been married five years and assumed that once they discontinued the pill, they would get pregnant straight away. Two years later it still wasn’t happening for them. From what I could see, there was nothing obvious in the their fertility biomarkers that…
Read MoreAnd baby makes three… or not
The big family planning issue for most couples used to be how to avoid unexpected pregnancies. As more couples marry later in life, increasingly this is shifting to be how to achieve the number of pregnancies they desire. In our last column, we discussed the ‘Goldilocks’ principle as it relates to the optimum age to…
Read MoreLove Gives Life – Members Content
True love cannot be contained; it always gives life in some form. For most couples, this will result in the biological birth of a child. For others, it will be expressed in a shared effort to generously give of their time and talents to others. “Masculinity contains in a hidden way the meaning of fatherhood…
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