Greater Bethesda Christian Center

Family Devotions

1. How many christian families today meet at least once a month or week for a devotion?

   Family devotions can prevent stress and other problems that can divide and destroy peace in the home.  Unfortunately, many christians today not only do not have family devotions, but they cannot remember the last time they sat at the dinner table together.  If you don't have a set time to allow your kids or spouse to talk about what's going on in their lives then you remove the closeness of getting to know them more and you do not give yourselves an opportunity to prevent anger explosions that can happen at the wrong time simply because they feel ignored

Step families

1. Are you struggling in your blended family?

   With the high incidence of divorce and changing patterns of families in the United States, there are increasing numbers of stepfamilies. New stepfamilies face many challenges. As with any achievement, developing good stepfamily relationships requires a lot of effort. Stepfamily members have each experienced losses and face complicated adjustments to the new family situation.

    

   When a stepfamily is formed, the members have no shared family histories or shared ways of doing things, and they may have very different beliefs. In addition, a child may feel torn between the parent they live with most (more) of the time and their other parent who they visit (e.g. lives somewhere else). Also, newly married couples may not have had much time together to adjust to their new relationship.

    

   The members of the new blended family need to build strong bonds among themselves through:

    

   acknowledging and mourning their losses

   developing new skills in making decisions as a family

   fostering and strengthening new relationships between: parents, stepparent and stepchild, and stepsiblings

   supporting one another; and

   maintaining and nurturing original parent-child relationships

    

    

   While facing these issues may be difficult, most stepfamilies do work out their problems. Stepfamilies often use grandparents (or other family), clergy, support groups, and other community-based programs to help with the adjustments. 

    

    source: American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry