Praying for Marriages (PfM)

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...

Please join us this week in praying for marriages that are dealing with the death of a child.  Maybe nothing feels as abnormal and as out of the natural order as a child preceding parents in death.  No parent expects it and no premarital counseling equips couples to deal with this emotionally charged occurrence. Though a child’s premature death can occur suddenly and without warning or after a prolonged illness, the end result is still a precious gift is gone.  The effects of this loss can be devastating to even the strongest marriages. Married couples that experience such a loss may experience no deeper grief.  Often this grief is accompanied by guilt, even when there are absolutely no grounds for it.  Groundless guilt is exceedingly hard on individuals since there is no wrong to work toward correcting and no blame for which to seek forgiveness.  It is a guilt without relief, and unrelieved guilt can destroy relationships. One ...

Please join us this week in praying for teenage marriages.  For mature couples getting started on the right foot in a marriage is difficult.  Starting well when both spouses are teenagers is even more difficult. Issues can arise as a simple matter of lack of maturity or life experience.  Many times these young couples have not had the chance to face problems as independent adults and, consequently, have not developed the skills to deal successfully with some of the trials of married life. Even in a perfect situation, just making the transition from dependent teenagers to an independent married couple can be extremely challenging.  Single teenage friends can have expectations of the new couple the spouses should no longer fulfill because their marriage now takes priority.  The pressure to be a part of the old group in the same old way can tempt the new couple to make decisions that would be harmful to their relationship. Another situa...