Sheila here! Every Friday, our email goes out to about 45,000 people, and Rebecca writes it, not me. And it's usually just awesome. Last week's email was special, coming at the end of a big week where we had lots of engagement around our podcast on the pathetic way...
Why are we asking women to choose between being a wife and being a mom? One of the themes that pops up often in evangelical marriage literature is warnings to women not to be a mom first and a wife second. It's in almost all of Gary Thomas' books. I used to teach it!...
Let men be dads! It's our third podcast in our let men be men series, and we're finishing that up today with a bang! We often get accused of hating men, which is funny, because we believe men are amazing! Men can be totally emotionally healthy. Men have the Holy...
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,...
Can discipline and kindness go together? Today on the Bare Marriage podcast we're joined by one of our favourite people, Wendy Snyder, a parenting coach with Fresh Start Family. She helps parents learn how firm kindness works--how we can connect with our kids through...
Why did the evangelical church not recognize pedophilic language? Last week on the Bare Marriage podcast we told you about Dannah Gresh's Secret Keeper Girl curriculum, popular during purity culture, which told 8-12 year-old girls that their bellies were...
We simply must talk more about how spanking affects children long term. The biggest group of people who still support spanking are evangelical Christians, yet the research about spanking being harmful for kids is overwhelming. I'm not going to rehash that today,...
Every now and then my grandkids give me a picture of God’s love for us. Or rather, their parents do. I don’t share about my grandkids very often, but last week, on a private Instagram page, Rebecca posted a series of pictures of my 3-year-old grandson Alex and his dad...
When I was speaking back in the early 2000s, I remember asking women if they were a better wife or a better mother. Almost everyone put their hands up to "better mother." And I remember saying, why don't we realize that what kids really need is a strong marriage? Why...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
When my daughter Rebecca was 19 months old, her baby brother died. He was only a month old. We learned when I was about 5 months pregnant about his heart condition, and that things would be very touch and go. We spent the last four months of the pregnancy petrified of...