Marriage and Children: How the church responds. Part 1.

I was reading Melbourne's Child the other day and found myself reading and article called the Parenting Paradox by Arthur C. Brooks when I came across this paragraph

The main way in which kids dent their parents' bliss appears to be the effect they have on marriage. Multiple studies show that the quality of a marriage, which is critically important for life satisfaction, falls precipitously low after the birth of a couple's first child. The lowest point for a marriage is - no surprise - when the children are adolescents. On the bright side, marriages tend to get better quickly after this point, and rise in quality all the way through to old age.

WOW!

I was stunned to read this. Did you know this? My first thought was "What does it mean for the way we do ministry?" I have seen the truth of that paragraph but had never realised this was a normal phenomenon.

Let's think about the implications of this: Marriage is going well. Couple decide to have a baby. Quality of marriage falls "precipitously low" after the birth of the couples first child.

That's bad right? I thought so, until I read the next sentence. Marriages reach their lowest point when children are adolescents. There's a lot of time that's passing between a new baby and adolescence a lot of time where things maybe aren't picking up. Maybe, for lots of couples, things don't improve until their kids are all grown up and gone...and for many couples the marriage is well and truly over by then. We just have to look around any room we are in to see that reality.

If you haven't caught where I am going yet, this has major implications for the way we minister to families. If we want to share the message of love and grace with them then we also need to care for their practical needs (where have we heard that before?!)

In my experience as a Children & Families Minister and in my own experience as a new mum I have see the opportunities presented to share the gospel with other Mum's. The whole process of bringing life into the world and then watching these little children grow and dealing with their inquisitive nature seems to lead parents to want to find answers, answers to the questions their children bring forward - both in their very being and in the thing they say.

Churches can be there to address this spiritual questioning but in order to do this they NEED to be there to support and nuture families practically, helping them form good foundations for the marriage into the future.

How good a job do you think your church is doing at meeting this need? Stay tuned, we'll get practical tomorrow when I give you some of my suggestions.

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