Does spanking help kids obey? Yesterday on the Bare Marriage podcast I had an amazing conversation with David and Amanda Erickson about their new book The Flourishing Family. One thing I especially appreciated about their book is that they brought in the data about...
Christian parenting advice is full of toxic teachings we need to ditch! It's not just marriage and sex where a lot of Christian teachings have gone wrong. It's also with parenting. Instead of teaching parents to connect with their kids and discipline in a way that...
Spanking your children is not good for them. A huge meta-analysis by Elizabeth Gershoff, done in 2016 of 160,000 children, found that spanking was either a net negative or neutral, but not positive. There are other discipline techniques that work better. In other...
Do you know what it really means to bless your child? When my daughters turned 13, each of them got a special party for their birthday dedicated to having key people in their lives share messages of encouragement and call out the ways God was moving and working in...
It's time for a new episode of the Bare Marriage podcast! I hope you all will listen, but if you don't have time, I'll have some links and rabbit trails below so you can read all you want as well! And consider this podcast "extras". If you want to go deeper into what...
We live in a world with such distorted sexuality that teaching kids about sex in a healthy way becomes challenging. First there's our culture which tells us that sexiness is all that matters--that sexual experimentation is part of figuring out who you are and being...
Talking to your kids about sex is a daunting task. But what do you do when your little ones start asking questions and you think, "I thought I had time before I had to deal with this!" Let's face it, sex conversations are almost always awkward. But they are so...
How do you give your kids a healthy view of marriage...if your marriage isn't healthy? Every Monday I like to post a reader question and take a stab at answering it, and today I've got a similar question from two hurting wives who are worried about the effects of...
Did you know that Supernanny US has uploaded a ton of full episodes to YouTube? Rebecca told me and I was so excited, because the girls and I used to love watching that show when they were teenagers. We'd sit on a Saturday morning with our breakfast and watch these...
Talking to your kids about sex and puberty is awkward. It just is. It's talking about something that is highly personal--really the most personal part of your life--with your children. It's that moment when your children go from being naive to understanding a lot...
Catching your child touching himself or herself when they're really young can be a difficult one for parents. And it's something that we often freak out about. What if they're growing into sex addicts? I get so many questions about how to handle a young daughter (say...
We all want kids to be innocent. But sometimes I worry that in our quest for innocence, we inadvertently push ignorance. I've been thinking about this a lot this last month as my girls and I gear up to launch our course, The Whole Story: Not So Scary Talks about Sex,...
Will the world come to an end if your kids know you have sex? It's Wednesday, the day when we always talk marriage here at To Love, Honor and Vacuum! And for the last few weeks my girls and I have been working on a really exciting project. We've been creating an...
We've been talking about Christmas this week, and for today's Friday Roundup I wanted to do something a little different than normal. So in keeping with our theme, today my daughter Rebecca is talking about some memories she has of Gregoire Christmases, but, most...
Are you the kind of mom who can easily talk to your older kids about sex? Or who WANTS to be that kind of mom when her kids are older? A while ago I posted a reader question on my Facebook Page, which I thought was really good. A Reader Asks: "My daughter is getting...