Family life can be challenging, but God has answers! Learn to make Him part of your family!
 

Books:

The Meaning of Marriage

Timothy Keller

Modern culture would have you believe that everyone has a soul mate; that romance is the most important part of a successful marriage; that your spouse is there to help you realize your potential; that marriage does not mean forever, but merely for now; and that starting over after a divorce is the best solution to seemingly intractable marriage issues. But these modern-day assumptions are wrong. Timothy Keller, with insights from Kathy, his wife of thirty-seven years, shows marriage to be a glorious relationship that is also misunderstood and mysterious. The Meaning of Marriage offers instruction on how to have a successful marriage, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to know God and love more deeply in this life.

Boundaries With Kids

Dr Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

What the award-winning Boundaries has done for adult relationships, Boundaries with Kids will do for you and your children. Here is the help you need for raising your kids to take responsibility for their actions, attitudes, and emotions. Doctors Henry Cloud and John Townsend take you through the ins and outs of instilling the kind of character in your children that will help them lead balanced, productive, and fulfilling adult lives. Learn how to set limits and still be a loving parent, bring control to an out-of-control family life, apply the ten laws of boundaries to parenting, define appropriate boundaries and consequences for your kids … and much more.

Boundaries With Teens

Dr. John Townsend

Teenagers! You love them to pieces … but sometimes you feel like the pieces are falling apart. Relax! Your sanity will survive these rocky teenage years, and so will your teens—provided you set healthy boundaries that work to their benefit and yours. Boundaries with Teens shows you how. From best-selling author and counselor Dr. John Townsend, here is the expert insight and guidance you need to help your teens take responsibility for their actions, attitudes, and emotions and gain a deeper appreciation and respect both for you and for themselves.

Boundaries in Marriage

Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

Boundaries, show couples how to apply the 10 laws of boundaries that can make a real difference in relationships. They help husbands and wives understand the friction points or serious hurts and betrayals in their marriage—and move beyond them to the mutual care, respect, affirmation, and intimacy they both long for.

8 Things No Kid Should Leave Home Without

Joe McGee

In this fast-paced world, time with your kids at home is limited and, before you know it, the day will arrive for your kids to move out of the house. Will they be ready for what faces them? Quality time loving and getting to know your kids is paramount, but it is also extremely important to prepare them for living life on their own. Joe McGee, author, life trainer, and former school administrator, gives you eight powerful principles that go beyond vocation, ethnicity, religious background, or upbringing. These principles are simple things you can give your kids to help them achieve a higher standard of living – a godly standard that will bring success and fulfillment.

The Connected Child

Drs. Karyn B. Purvis and David R. Cross

The adoption of a child is always a joyous moment in the life of a family. Some adoptions, though, present unique challenges. Welcoming these children into your family – and addressing their special needs – requires care, consideration, and compassion.

Written by two research psychologists specializing in adoption and attachment, The Connected Child will help you:

•Build bonds of affection and trust with your adopted child
•Effectively deal with any learning or behavioral disorders
•Discipline your child with love without making him or her feel threatened

Raising Passionate Jesus Followers

Phil Comer and Diane Comer

In Raising Passionate Jesus Followers, Phil and Diane Comer bring hope and practical help to parents whose greatest longing is to shepherd their children into a vibrant faith in God.

For Christian parents, there is no greater joy than seeing their children learn to walk with the Lord. And there is no greater fear than that their children will walk away from God.

After serving together in pastoral ministry for forty years, Phil and Diane Comer know those hopes and fears well. Thirty-seven years ago, they became parents themselves. And like all new parents, they were intimidated and unsure about how to take on the task of spiritually training their young children.

Now, with all four of their children grown and establishing their own households of faith, Phil and Diane have embarked on a quest to help the next generation of parents raise passionate Jesus followers. Drawing on years of pastoral counseling, teaching, leading, and decades of watching families from the perspective of pastors and leaders in ministry, Phil and Diane instruct, guide, encourage, and offer hope and practical help to Christian parents.

Raising Passionate Jesus Followers is a manual full of practical, biblically-based, and time-tested guidelines that parents will be able to turn to again and again through every stage of their children’s development. Starting at birth, into grade school, through the daunting teenage years, to launching them into college, and finally letting go, this book contains the whys and the hows parents need.

12 Huge Mistakes Parents Can Avoid: Leading Your Kids to Succeed in Life

Tim Elmore

You’re deeply committed to helping your kids succeed. But you’re concerned―why are so many graduates unprepared to enter the workforce and face life on their own? You’re doing your best to raise healthy children, but sometimes you wonder, am I really helping them?

Tim Elmore shows you how to avoid twelve critical mistakes parents unintentionally make. He outlines practical and effective parenting skills so you won’t fall into common traps, such as…

•making happiness a goal instead of a by-product
•not letting kids struggle or fight for what they believe
•not letting them fail or suffer consequences
•lying about kids’ potential―and not exploring their true potential
•giving them what they should earn
Find out why thousands of organizations have sought out Tim Elmore to help them develop young leaders―and how you can improve your parenting skills and help your kids soar.
Scriptures:
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
I Corinthians 13:4-7
Come, you children, listen to me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.
 
Psalm 34:11
 
For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord. They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.
Jeremiah 29:11
For You O Lord, will bless the righteous; With favor You will surround him as with a shield.
 
Psalm 5:12
 
You saw me before I was born. Every day of my life was recorded in your book. Every moment was laid out before a single day had passed.
Psalm 139:16
 
And these Words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up.
 
Deuteronomy 6:6-9
Chasten your son while there is hope, and do not set your heart on his destruction.
 
Proverbs 19:18
 
Train up a child in the way he should go, when he is old he will not depart from it.
 
Proverbs 22:6
Don’t hold back correction from a child. If you correct them, they won’t die. So correct them. Then you will save them from death.
 
Proverbs 23:13-14 NIRV
Children are going to do foolish things. But correcting them will drive that foolishness far away.
 
Proverbs 22:15 NIRV
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise: “that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth”. And you, Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger by the way you treat them. Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction that comes from the Lord.
 
Ephesians 6:1-4