When our kids are little, talking about faith is relatively easy. We read Bible stories. We ask Jesus into our hearts. We pray together for him to watch over our family and friends, and to help us when we’re afraid. And then the hard part starts. Sometime around eleven-years-old they begin to ask questions….
All the hot dogs, burgers and shakes you can consume. That sounds like the ultimate job perk to the average teenager, doesn’t it? My son certainly thought so. He doesn’t anymore. But before we get to that… Getting healthy as a family has been really fun for my kids (except the exact opposite) For…
I didn’t even hesitate when I saw the subject line in my inbox last week. With the words “The most powerful way to unclutter your life,” I was promptly lured into a click. Within minutes I was reading the article and mentally taking notes about the best ways to simplify my life. Some people…
Growing up, whenever I got in trouble, my punishment was being sent to my room. To an introverted kid, this was a delight. I just curled up with some good books and got lost in my imagination for a while. My oldest boy, Asher, shares this same affinity for quiet time. When sharing a room…
Conversations Happen Over Blueberries and Bathwater “My husband died when my children were in preschool. He was sick for twelve hours with an illness the ER doctors misdiagnosed, and he died on our bedroom floor two days before Christmas. Overnight, my children lost their dad and I became a 31-year-old widow.” These are the…
Splink 1: Staying Together Go outside and play Blob Tag. The object of the game is to tag all players, making them part of the Blob. The game starts out as an ordinary game of tag except that as players are tagged, they join hands with the Blob (the person who is “it”) and…
Sometimes, as an attempt to comfort your heart as you are struggling through a new diagnosis, or even years afterward, friends or family might offer consolation by saying something along the lines of, “God chose to give you a child with autism because He knew you were strong enough”, or one of my personal favorites,…
So you might have noticed there’s this tension in parenting. Okay . . . you may have noticed, there are 1,000 tensions in parenting, but today I’m going to focus on just one. What tension you ask? The tension between the parent who wants to enforce the rules and the parent who wants to focus on…
*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on Deseret News. Do American teenagers still have reverence for the Bible? That’s a central question that guided a recently released report about youths’ biblical engagement. Despite increasing secularization in American culture, the study, titled, “Teen State of the Bible 2016,” found that a majority…
*The following is excerpted from an online article posted on Live Science. Across the U.S., there’s been an uptick in the percentage of teens who are having episodes of depression, a new report finds. From 2013 to 2014, about one in nine teens in the United States had a major depressive episode, up from about one in 10…