Praying for Marriages (PfM)

Please join us this week in praying for couples that have been disowned by their children.  The nature and causes of fractured family relationships are varied, complex and rarely one-sided.  The division can be the choice of the parents or the child/children.  Regardless, the division is always painful to someone, if not to everyone. One variety of fractured family relationships is when children disown their parents.  The impetus for this separation can be rooted in bad parenting choices or in the equally bad choices of adult children.  In either case, the painful effects the division has on the disowned couple can be a challenge to the very existence of their own husband/wife relationship. If the estrangement from their children is the result of bad parenting choices, particularly if those choices were those of one parent (for example, an absentee father or an overly protective/smothering mother), the other spouse may harbor resentment and bla...

Please join us this week in praying for married couples parenting their grandchildren.  In preparing for this blog I came across an article issued by the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.  This article, which is reproduced in full below, states the challenges of this life situation exceptionally well.  The article was originally posted in March 2011 at http://aacap.org. "Grandparents are an important resource for both parents and children. They routinely provide child care, financial assistance and emotional support.  Occasionally they are called upon to provide much more including temporary or full time care and responsibility for their grandchildren. An increasing number of children in the United States live in households headed by a grandparent.  This trend is due to: increasing numbers of single parent families the high rate of divorce teenage pregnancies incarcerations of parents substance abuse by parents...

Please join us this week in praying for marriages in which couples are involved in foster care.  Couples who choose to be foster parents are choosing an honorable endeavor, but, like any worthwhile endeavor, foster parenting can bring significant challenges to a marriage. One of those challenges is the demand on time.  Most foster parenting situations require meetings with counselors, agencies, teachers, birth-parents etc.  These requirements take time and necessarily cut into the time a couple may be accustomed to spending with each other.  Making the most of this decreased couple-time is a challenge requiring creativity and commitment. Another challenge is the emotional investment required to parent a child who likely will be experiencing some level of dysfunction because of his/her previous home situation.  Dealing with the child’s biological parents, who likely will not be satisfied with their child being removed from their care, may...

Please join us this week in praying for marriages living through the chronic illness of an adult child. The emotional stress of this life situation is not lessened because a chronically ill child is an adult.  Parents don’t cease to be parents because a child is grown.  For a number of reasons the stress can actually be greater than it would be if the child were a dependent. Usually an adult child and his/her parents live in separate households and often are separated by a geographical distance that makes care-giving difficult and just staying informed a challenge.  Also, the fact that an adult child has established a level of independence can cause parents to question what care is expected, desired or would even be accepted. In ideal situations in which the child-parent relationship is good, the parents’ marriage can still be strained as they take on time-consuming care-giving, such as care of grandchildren and medical transportation, or even...