This will be my LAST POST!!! For this class anyways :) This week we discussed divorce, remarriage and step-families. Something interesting my teacher pointed out was that boys often have a harder time with divorce than girls do. We tried to formulate reasons as to why this would be. I believe it is because usually the children live with their mother after the divorce. This leaves the family with no male to preside, provide and protect the family. This responsibility then may lay on the oldest, or most responsible, male child's shoulders. We discussed the issues with divorce and remarriage but also pointed out that in nuclear families problems need to be solved and dealt with as well. Divorced and re-married families may just have an added measure of difficulty with this.

Today we discussed what the purposes are of parenting. There are many purposes to parenting. One of the first that comes to my mind is becoming more like God. We are given such a divine right in this life to be more like God by being able to have and raise children. Although I am not a parent yet I realize that it is a very important responsibility parents are given to guide, love and protect their children. They also have the responsibility to teach their children responsibility, love, natural consequences and the realisms of the world. 
One thing we discussed in class was cooperation and how we were taught cooperation. When I was young my brother and I were fighting. We always got into annoying little fights and would whine and complain to my mom. "He's hitting me", "She's pinching me". One day my parents decided that they were not going to intervene anymore and stop us from fighting so we just went at it. We were probably only fighting for about 10 minutes but it seemed like an hour to me until we were both in tears. We never fought like that again. We learned that there were other ways to cooperate rather than fighting. Haha mom and dad I hope you laughed reading this :) 

This week we talked about Fatherhood and Motherhood - and the differences between the two. I think this is so perfectly timed especially with the Supreme Court Debate going on right now about changing the Marriage Law. I am going to focus on Fatherhood and the importance of it.
What are a few things Fathers do in children's lives? 
1. Fathers build confidence. Fathers are much more opt to encourage their kids to swing or climb a little higher or throw just a little bit harder, which challenges them and increases their confidence to do thing. 
2. Fathers communicate differently. In a large study it was shown that when speaking to children mothers will simplify their words whereas Fathers are not as inclined to do so. By doing this Father's challenge and expand the child's linguistic skills. 
3. Fathers help prepare children for the real world. Fathers are more likely to show children that attitudes and behaviours lead to consequences. 
Mothers of course have a great role in the child's life as well. Mothers teach love, compassion, trust and so much more. I think that in today's society the importance of the role of both a mother and a father are being pushed aside. 
I watched a testimonial of a young girl in the supreme court who talked about her parents. She explained the important things she has learned from having both a father and a mother and asked the court, which one will you take away? Which one can I do without? I think that is the same question we should ask ourselves. 

COMMUNICATION. 
Communication? 
Communication!!!!
Communication.........
As you read those different ways of me expressing the simple word "communication" you all probably read into it differently as I punctuated and wrote the word differently. Chances are many of you also read it differently than I intended. This is a common example of miscommunication. Nowadays, especially because of technology, the sending and receiving of messages can so easily be misinterpreted. In communication we read into non-verbal communication much more than we do in what the person is actually saying. Because of this it is easy to understand how messages can be wrongly decoded when we can not see the non-verbal side of what someone is saying. Therefore it is totally up to our interpretation. For example I use multiple periods when I am annoyed or frustrated. Like "um ok.....". Whereas some people just use them as commas or spaces between what they are saying. Learning to encode and decode messages sent (whether through technology or not) is a skill everyone can work on. 

This week we talked about STRESS. Ah, something that has been hanging over me the past few weeks. We all have experienced stress. But what is it really? Does it always have to be a bad thing? 
In Chinese if you break apart the symbols that spell crisis they mean "danger" and "opportunity". I think this is so interesting. This tells us that stress does not always have to be a bad thing. We can learn and grow though the stress and trials in this life. This is shown in this month's Ensign article "Raising Resilient Children". We can always learn and grow, something I have always felt very important in life is remembering the Law of the Harvest. We have to work hard and learn the things Heavenly Father wants us to know before we are rewarded with our plentiful harvest.                

"If we would truly seek to be more like our Savior and Master, learning to love as He loves should be our highest goal". President Ezra Taft Bensen. 
I must admit, I've been putting off blogging about this week. This week was our physical intimacy week. I'm just going to overview the hormones in physical intimacy which I found very interesting. There are 3 main hormones released in sexual intimacy, serotonin, dopamine and oxytocin. Oxytocin is a very powerful hormone associated with kissing, cuddling, sexual intimacy and pregnancy. In essence this is a bonding chemical. How perfect is it that this hormone is released during sexual intimacy, I am so happy our Heavenly Father created us the way He did so a husband and wife can become even closer through this means. 

One of the things that I found interesting in discussion this week was the adjustments a couple will face in marriage. Budgeting was a huge one that I think will be difficult to adjust to. Budgeting money is one that came to my mind, but someone brought up the time you will have to budget as well. Whether its work, school, cars, recreation or time spent together. 

Another things we discussed was children and how children change the marriage. I think that is going to be a very difficult transition - going from having your full focus on one another to so much focus on your child. There was a study done that showed that men generally perceive their wife to be more disagreeable after they had children. In actuality women were more agreeable after children. Why then would the men think this? One theory we came up with in class was that after children are born women tend to have a lot less time to care for and nurture their husband - so the husband feels less important and "second best" now. The wife can feel very overwhelmed in this situation with trying to balance both the role of a wife and the role of a mother. If not communicated as a couple this can cause tension and feelings of isolation in both the husband and the wife. 

How do we avoid this? 

One thing my teacher shared was that his wife tried to share every experience she had with him. If the baby kicked she would have him feel it. She had him at all the doctor appointments and after the children were born included him in as many activities with them as she could. At first he thought she was just being demanding - but after realized how divine her actions were. It kept them close as a couple and certainly close as a family.  
If you have any advice on changes when you were married/had a child please comment :) 

Love. What a fitting topic :) 
This week in class we studied love and all the different types of love out there. There is charity, the pure love of Christ, the love we feel for family, the love we feel for close friends and the romantic love we feel for that special someone. 
What I am going to share today is not what we discussed in class but a discussion I had after class. 

We were talking about dating and this girl in my class made an incredible observation. She stated that everyone is walking around all searching for the same thing but no one ever says anything. Love is too scary to talk about, yet everyone wants to be loved. Why do we do this? Are we afraid of rejection? Failure? Or are we afraid that it might actually work out. Sometimes we can be so afraid of love that we don't even give it a chance. We judge someone right away assuming they are too good for us, or not good enough. Why don't we just give them a chance? Human relationships are an essential part of life. If we don't risk it we may never get the biscuit. Be honest, give people a chance, and just HAVE FUN. Be bold and courageous in love. Yes, you risk getting hurt if you put your feelings out there, but if you don't you risk missing out on a lot more. 

While preparing for class this week we were able to learn about the different characteristics of both genders. So female vs male - what is it that makes the other gender so complex? Here are a few key things that I learned that really resonated with me. 

1. Women are much more relationship oriented than men. 
   
2. Women and men both experience about the same feelings on a daily basis but women just have a greater degree of expressing those feelings (so women AREN'T really more emotional, they just show it more often which is why it has led us to think that)
3. Women are much more sensitive to non-verbal communication than men (for good reason - as women are the primary care-givers)
4. Men are naturally more aggressive (which even shows up when comparing boy and girl toddlers)
5. Men are more spatial oriented (which kind of means they are focused on one thing at a time)

Men's brains vs Women's brains

Men's brains can be compared to a room full of boxes - they move from one box to another whereas Women's brains can be compared to a ball of wire - everything connects to something else. Men's brains have more grey matter - which means more storage area in the brain. Women's brains have more white matter (about 5x more) which is associated with verbal and emotion connection. This may be why women express their emotions more often - because it is easier for them

I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In The Family: A Proclamation to the World (which you can find a link to at the top of this page) it is proclaimed that in the family men are to 1 Provide 2 Preside 3 Protect their families and women are primarily responsible for the nurture of their children. 

Knowing the different responsibility that each spouse holds in the family relates perfectly to the attributes that as men and women we hold. Men are more aggressive which definitely helps in the protection of the family but also the providing and presiding over the family. Women are more relationship oriented, and able to read non verbal cues better than men which makes sense in that nurturing children consists of developing relationships and reading many non-verbal cues.

There was a woman who spoke in another class about Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia - which is a disease associated with having excessive or deficient sex steroids. The type this woman had caused her to have a more "male" brain. Not in attraction but in drive. So when her and her husband had children she did not have the instinctive motherly traits that women usually have. 

The word preside derives from the word, president which means a delegator of , or to direct and lead. We do not believe that the man is in charge and has final say. Both the husband and the wife are on equal ground.

In class this week we were able to research families in different social classes. Research had found the social class you are born into is a very large determiner of what social class you will be in when you start your life. There are people who can move social classes, but this can require a lot of work. This brought us to a very interesting discussion of how we know what class people are in. And the thing it all came down to was judgements. In reality we don't know the specific financial standings of those around us. We put people into different classes based on the size of their house, their toys, the way they hold themselves, the activities they participate in. This really hit me because we really don't know where people are financially and it taught to me that we often judge so poorly. Just because someone has a nice house and a nice car doesn't mean that they are rich, they may be very much in debt. It reassured to me how important it is to not judge unrighteously, as the Savior has taught time and time again.
Something else that we learned about was Genograms. Genograms are basically 4 generation family trees but with information about each family member and patterns that have been passed down. My teacher then brought up some of the teachings of the Bible and specifically in Isaiah when the Lord tells the people that generations of their family will be cursed by their decisions. He commented that he had always thought it was so harsh that the Lord would curse those other generations for one persons decision but when he started studying genograms he was able to see more of what the Lord meant. Heavenly Father knew how families worked and how patterns were passed down from generation to generation unless they were mindfully broken. What patterns are there in your family? Do you want to break them? If you are able to ponder this I