The following are links for Web Site as well as descriptions of resources related to the effect that children can have upon a marriage. We pray you will find them to be helpful for your marriage and your family life.

• www.babygrief.com This is a website for moms and dads dealing with the loss of a baby. Developed by Elizabeth Honeycutt, who got the idea for this the BabyGrief website after losing her first child at 18 weeks. She said, “The purpose of this website is to offer encouragement and hope to moms, dads, and others who have experienced miscarriage or stillbirth,” She shares her experience and the hope she found in God with others around the world by providing individual pages that “deal with the difficult issues that arise from dealing with a miscarriage, like pain, anger, and guilt.”

• www.bethany.com This Stepping Stones web site is provided as a ministry of Bethany services. They are a Christ centered ministry which helps couples face infertility challenges or pregnancy loss. They provide practical information and resources to help you make wise decisions for infertility treatment, as well as strategies to help you cope effectively with primary or secondary infertility. They also provide inspiration and strength from God’s Word. Stepping Stones is a wonderful Christian infertility resource.

• www.familylife.com This the web site for the ministry of Family Life Today. This is a great ministry and they have a great web site that you could find very helpful. In particular, if you go into their web site and click into “Articles” and then select “Marriage.” You can also select “Parenting” after selecting “Articles.” In each case, you will find a long list of articles you can choose, from which you can read concerning children’s effect on marriage.

• www.family.org This is the web site for the great ministry of Focus on the Family. One of the many features of this web site can be found when you place your cursor over the top bar that says “Relationship and Marriage.” A drop-down box will show up and you can select a topic which will give you a number of articles to read. You can also select “Parenting.”

• www.hannah.org —Hannah’s Prayer Ministries provides Christian based support and encouragement to couples around the world who are struggling with the pain of fertility challenges including primary and secondary infertility, pregnancy loss, early infant death and adoption loss. Their outreach extends to those who become parents of living children through pregnancy, adoption and/or foster care. All of the staff members are unpaid volunteers who are proclaiming Christians (from a range of denominational backgrounds) and have personal experience with the heartache of fertility challenges.

• www.homeword.com — The HomeWord ministries, with Jim Burns seeks to advance the work of God in the world by educating, equipping, and encouraging parents and churches to build God-honoring families from generation to generation.

• www.incmoms.com This web site is committed to helping every mother in the U.S. who wants to work-from-home do so! They provide free work-at-home job listings, almost daily! They have also expanded their website to include a section on fertility support. This will include a blog as well as resources to help during this trying time.

• www.jillsavage.org — This is the web site for author Jill Savage. This web site is sponsored by Family Dynamics Institute which has parenting and family programs which equips people for the challenges of parenting today.

• www.marriagepartnership.com. Marriage Partnership Magazine is an American-based magazine dedicated to strengthening your marriage which helps you get a better picture of how to work together as a team. This EXCELLENT resource focuses on a variety of vital marital issues like communication, money, forgiveness, sex, and your spiritual life together. (You can put “children” into their search feature and will be able to select over 300 articles to read.) It’s written for both husbands and wives, comes out quarterly, and is published by Christianity Today International. We HIGHLY recommend it to all who can obtain it. They also have a free newsletter which you can sign up for at their very helpful web site. (You’ll need to have access to the internet in order to read the articles featured in this newsletter.) We subscribe to both the magazine and the newsletter and have found them to be very helpful to our own marriage and also in ministering to others who are married.

• www.missinggrace.org The mission of the Missing GRACE Foundation is to provide resources and support for families that have experienced: pregnancy loss, infant loss, infertility or adoption and to advocate for comprehensive, patient-focused prenatal care for all women. Five core areas encompass the heart of the mission: Grieve, Restore, Arise, Commemorate and Educate.

• www.momsense.com — MomSense is a magazine that is a service of Christianity Today International. Their web site deals with parenting issues, of which how children effect marriage.

• www.realrelationships.com This is the web site for Dr Les and Dr Leslie Parrott who are a husband-and-wife team who not only share the same name, but the same passion for helping others build healthy relationships. In 1991, the Parrotts founded the Center for Relationship Development on the campus of Seattle Pacific University — a groundbreaking program dedicated to teaching the basics of good relationships. Their web site has free videos that you can view on your computer which gives relationship advice on many different subjects you will deal with in your married lives together including “children.” We highly advise that you visit their web site to see what they can offer you.

• www.sarahs-laughter.com This web site provides support for those who are struggling with infertility and/or the death of a baby. They recognize that the life changing devastations of infertility or the loss of a baby, is simply too hard for women to survive on their own. Sarah’s Laughter offers support to those that reach out to them through a variety venues.

• www.theintentionallife.com — The Intentional Life.com ministers to others through Christ-centered communication. They build healthy family relationships with biblically-based advice from Dr Randy Carlson and other experts on issues facing today’s families.

• www.troubledwith.com This web site belongs to the ministry of Focus on the Family and has quite a few sections that could help you with your marriage and with parenting, as well as having a section on “Miscarriage” and “Infertility”.

RESOURCE DESCRIPTIONS:

• CHILD-PROOFING YOUR MARRIAGE -by Dr Debbie Cherry, published by Life Journey (a division of Cook Communications Ministries). In this book Dr Cherry provides easy-to-follow directions to help couples avoid the pitfalls of growing apart. Learning to nurture your marriage, while nurturing your children, is a priceless skill that may just save your marriage. It’s become an increasingly common issue today for couples to spend their childrearing years nurturing their children at the expense of their marriage! Couples tend to think, “After the children are gone, we’ll get to be a couple again.” In many cases, by the time the kids are off to college, so much distance has crept in that couples hardly know each other. But this scenario can easily be avoided! Divorces can be prevented and arguments avoided when couples discover the importance and the principles of being couple-focused rather than child-focused. Buy this book now.

• CHOOSING TO CHEAT- Who Wins When Family and Work Collide, by Andy Stanley, published by Thomas Nelson Publishers, www.thomasnelson.com. This book presents a strategic plan for resolving the tension between work and home. You’ll find ways to deal with the busyness that wreaks havoc with the relationships you consider most important.

As Dr John Maxwell says about this book [which we agree]: “This is a life-changing book and extremely relevant to our modern way of life. Author Andy Stanley confronts us with truth and transparency. Just as he had made a commitment in his own life to balance his family time with his work, he encourages us to make similar commitments. One of the main reasons it is life changing is because a godly man who makes choices in his own life to never sacrifice his family for success has written it. If he wins the world but loses his family, what has he gained? Every couple, every parent, and every leader needs to read this book and consider the question: Who wins when my family and work collide?” Buy this book now.

• LOVE LIFE FOR PARENTS - by David and Claudia Arp, published by Zondervan Publishing, www.zondervan.com. This book takes an easy, fun, and realistic approach to putting interest back in intimacy, readiness back in romance, and the sizzle back in sex! The Arps offer practical advice, which is “explicit enough to be understandable, objective enough to be helpful, readable enough to be entertaining”, and also they help remind couples everywhere “what used to make their marriage special and show them how to get that sparkle back.” It’s a great resource for couples and for parents. As one reviewer said, “This book does more than talk about how having kids can drain romance from marriage-it tells parents how to revive their love life.” As Dr Scott Stanley said of this book, “It’s a wonderful collection of practical steps for keeping the spice in your marriage while living in the family lane.”

• THE MOTHER-IN-LAW DANCE: Can Two Women Love the Same Man and Still Get Along? -by Annie Chapman, published by Harvest House www.harvesthousepublishers.com. This book has so much to offer. I’ve (Cindy) always loved everything Annie has written but this is one of her best. I’d highly recommend this book to everyone to read who either is a mother-in-law or has a mother-in-law because it has something in it that everyone can learn from and be inspired. In this book Annie Chapman describes the often delicate relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law as a dance. She very candidly discusses the twists and turns of this connection and provides practical advice to help you better relate with your mother- or daughter-in-law.

Drawing on years of experience, real-life input from other women through hundreds of conversations with women and specially designed questionnaires, and solid biblical insights that will encourage your own spiritual growth, Annie reveals potential missteps to watch out for, and practical ideas to help you create more positive interactions with your in-law to successfully: build a great relationship - deal with new traditions and activities - overcome hurts and conflicts - set realistic boundaries - handle generation-gap issues - accept (and reject) advice - and cope with differences in faith. We hope you’ll obtain a copy of this book for your own use and to give out to others as a gift. Buy this book now.

• WHEN HUSBAND AND WIFE BECOME MOM AND DAD -by Elisa Morgan and Carol Kuykendall (of MOPS International), published by Zondervan Publishing House, www.zondervan.com. This is a book that helps to put everything right side up after your children have turned your world upside down. It’s written by two authors who have based the content of this book on several decades of experience with parents of preschoolers and have included the results of over 1,000 questionnaires sent to new moms and dads. It helps you and your spouse to understand and meet six areas of need in your marriage:

• Balance-addressing the question, “What’s happened to our marriage?”
• Commitment-addressing the question, “Will you love me even when it’s hard?”
• Interdependence-addressing the question, “Who are you and me now that we are three?”
• Mission-addressing the question, “What makes this family a family?”
• Hope-addressing the question, “Where is happily ever after?”

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