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...
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AGING PARENTS SERIES: Setting Boundaries with Aging Parents
How do you set boundaries on how much help you can reasonably give to aging parents? This week I'm re-running a series I wrote a few years ago. We started yesterday talking about how parents should really try to help their adult children who will be caring for them...
aging Parents series: You Owe Your Adult Children a Life
If you need your adult children to eventually care for you, then that should factor into an equation NOW. I've been thinking about something for a while now that I'd like to just say. It's going to be a bit of a rant, and I may not sound very sympathetic. But I think...
How Camping Made Me Realize My Bras Hurt
Keith and I have been in the RV for a week and I have made a significant discovery! First, though, I'm not going to have a normal post up today. I'm in vacation mode and couldn't think of anything about marriage to write about. Rebecca, however, has already written...
Unveiling a Ten Year Project: Plus Serving a God Who Knits Everything Together
On the a vacation we took just over a decade ago, I started knitting a blanket. It was what knitters call a "sock yarn blanket", meaning that it's made from all the ends of balls you have after you've finished a pair of socks. For twenty years I've been knitting...
One Woman Shares How Being Spanked as a Child Affected Her Sexually
The harm from spanking doesn't always come from the spanking being done in anger, or by terrible parents. Sometimes the harm comes from good parents who spanked "in love", exactly how the church taught them to. When I wrote about the harms from spanking a few weeks...
The Sexual Element in Spanking Children: Let’s Ask the Uncomfortable Questions
Can we talk about something hush hush? What if spanking kids is also a form of sexual assault? Hear me out on this one, okay? I've shared a number of social media posts and podcasts about spanking lately, including what the large meta-analysis of 160,000 children...
Does Every Marriage Need a Captain? Do Husbands Need to Make the Decisions?
Do marriages need someone to be in charge? And what does it mean if you assume that they do? Last week Alistair Begg, a big speaker and theologian, posted this on social media:I could say so much about what's theologically wrong with this statement, but I'd encourage...
Break the Cycle: Learn Positive Discipline with Kids, Rather than Punitive Control
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,...
ATTACHMENT SERIES: How Can You Grow a Healthy Attachment Style?
If you know you have an unhealthy attachment style, how can you grow and change? It's the last day in May, and so I want to wrap up our posts about attachment styles. I'm so glad so many of you have found this concept helpful; it's really changed how I see the main...
On Spanking: When You Think You’re Following the Bible, but You’re Really Following Your Own Interpretation
It's easy to use the "we're just following the Bible!" trumpcard when debating something, and spanking proves an excellent example of how this can go awry. We've been talking about spanking as a method of discipline for a few weeks now, and two weeks ago we did a...
Spanking Fixed It For You: It’s Okay to Change Your Mind about Spanking
I never spanked my kids. Well, there's a funny story about Katie, but I'll leave that for another time. What I did do, though, was write a column in my weekly paper about twenty years ago bemoaning the fact that the Children's Aid Society was taking children away...
On Modesty: We Shouldn’t Sacrifice Teen Girls’ Well-Being for Adult Men’s Comfort
A basic principle in the Old Testament is actually quite a simple one: People of God don't sacrifice children. Read through the prophets, and you'll hear the judgment against nations that sacrifice their kids to Molech, or make children "walk through the fire."...