Big Christmas dinners with all the siblings and parents and in-laws. It can be very Norman Rockwell. But it can also be filled with boisterous arguments. Lots of alcohol. Swearing. Political discussions. It can be really uncomfortable. And so, at Christmas, we’re...
A lot of people need to hear this for Christmas! I wrote this a few years ago, and I wanted to revisit it today as we get closer to Christmas. You aren't responsible for other people's feelings! And many of us need to hear that. Are you responsible for making your...
Has gentle parenting been given a bad rap? For good reason? We had an amazing podcast last week with Wendy Snyder from Fresh Start Families, and this Tuesday we're doing a FREE webinar with Wendy to talk about how to parent with both kindness and firmness. It's all...
Today I want to talk about another aspect of purity culture: Its affect on overweight girls. I received an Instagram message recently from a woman telling her story, and it was so interesting I thought it deserved its own post so we could think about it and talk about...
We know that parenting is the biggest responsibility we will ever have. But we've been told such different things about the nature of that responsibility. If you grew up in an evangelical church, chances are you were told that a parent's job is to teach them to obey,...
Welcome to a new season on the Bare Marriage blog! We're about to begin a new series, starting tomorrow, on obligation sex--how to understand it and get over it. But before we do that, I received this great article by Dr. Camden Morgante (known as Dr. Camden around...
What if our advice actually triggers the behaviour we want to prevent? One of my favourite places on the internet is our private Patreon Facebook group, where the people who support us financially hang out. For just $5 a month people can join our Patreon group, and in...
Let's use a real-life example of purity culture double standards: Brio Magazine Yesterday on the podcast Rebecca and I read excerpts from old copies of Focus on the Family's Brio magazine, aimed at teen girls 12-16. We wanted you to hear first hand what purity culture...
It's our 200th episode! And we wanted to celebrate by doing something that matters to Rebecca--and to so many of you. We wanted to read some back issues of Brio Magazine, the magazine for preteen and teen girls published by Focus on the Family that encapsulated purity...
She should know that Jesus is not a Jealous Boyfriend. In our book She Deserves Better, we have 32 headings that start "She Should Know..." 32 things that girls need to know, in the very fiber of their being, to dispel a lot of the harmful things we too often have...
Are we missing something if we save kissing for marriage? One of the tenets of purity culture was that all physical contact--even kissing--should be saved for marriage. It wasn't just that sex is for marriage. It was that kissing was too. Some couples didn't even...
When you're a teen, it's normal to have sexual feelings. In fact, sexual feelings are a normal part of life for adults too! We have sex dreams (the content of which can sometimes be quite alarming). We can feel attraction to people. We can feel "horny", for lack of a...
Every Young Man’s Battle is the only book I ever reviewed that made me weep. Perhaps it’s because I read it after I had already read a whole bunch of books aimed at teen girls, and it was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I think there was a whole other...
"How do I talk to a woman about what she's wearing?" I've received a number of social media messages from women lately asking how to approach a woman about her clothing choices. In some cases it's been a work situation. In others a ministry situation. In several...
What exactly does "purity culture" refer to? Our recent book She Deserves Better spends about half of its pages addressing many aspects of purity culture, that was so common in youth groups between 1995-2015, and shows how it deviated from the gospel and from what we...