Other words of advice

In our pre-cana folder, we had many other worksheets to read and think about after the weekend. One was rules for disagreements which made me think of this tv show I used to watch - TLC's "Shamlom in the Home. After going to pre-cana, I went and found the ideas that Rabbi Shmuley (the host of "Shalom in the Home") has for a good marriage and family. A lot of these resonate with me. Accordin to the Rabbi (who can be a bit harsh at times, I am not going to lie or sugar coat his ideas):

You can't be a good parent without being a good spouse.

There are two kinds of parental love: the love you give your kids, and the love you give your spouse.

Kids with loving spouses grow up believing in romantic love.

It's your kid's job to resist. It's your job to impose your will.

Good discipline is just another form of love.

Ten percent of life is what happens; the other 90 percent is what you do about it.

Many of us parent out of fear - fear of alienating our kids, fear of making the wrong choice - but fear never leads to the right destination. You cannot fix your children without also fixing yourself.

The greatest gift a man & a woman can give to their children is the gift of loving each other.

Shalom in the home, domestic tranquility, is the ultimate blessing. The man who has a woman who believes in him is impregnable and invincible. Nothing in life can hurt him because he has peace at this center.

Your marriage is not a facet of your life. It is your life. It is not a detail of your happiness, but its source and greatest blessing. Swallow your pride. Go back to the person to whom you once committed your life and exert the energy to make the marriage work again. By doing so you will have the satisfaction of knowing, not only that you never stopped climbing – that you never quit – but rather that you never climbed alone.

There is enough uncontrollable pain in life without us unnecessarily adding self-inflicted wounds.
The hero is not the man who conquers the world, but who conquers his own passions.

We dare never parent out of fear. Fear is a hysterical reaction to an imagined threat, while caution is a calculated response to a real danger.

We must raise our children to fear none but God alone.

A parent’s bedroom is not a family sitting room or family dormitory. Children should never sleep in their parents’ bedroom. If you need to hire a security guard to make your bedroom into Fort Knox, that is still better than allowing your role as parent to conflict with your role as lover to your spouse.

The rule of relationships is this: We all want to be wanted, need to be needed, desire to be desired. Demonstrating a dependency on the object of your love is the golden rule of relationships.

Man is a force of nature, like a hurricane, whose turbulence is on the extremities but has utter calm at its center. We are powerful when we have shalom, tranquility, in the home, when the place to which we retreat is tranquil. Then, none of the external noise pierces our soul. For many families today, however, they have tumultuous winds in the home, forcing them to flee to mind-numbing escapes on the extremities, outside the home.

It’s not true that a couple’s sex life need end with the advent of children. On the contrary, what is lovemaking other than a man and woman at play, flirtatious and precocious. And the natural playfulness that children inject into the lives of their parents can help them to draw closer.

The greatest gift that a man can give his children is to love their mother. Conversely, the greatest gift that a mother can give her children is to love their father.

By being happily married we gift to our children the knowledge that love works, that the world is comprised of pieces of a puzzle that ultimately fit.

The man who cheats on his wife thinks of himself as an adventurer, when really he is a wanderer.

We dare not make money into a commodity by which to purchase self-esteem.

The foremost sin in a marriage is to put someone (even your child) before each other.

The real purpose of counseling a family is not to point out right and wrong, but to inspire them to choose the right and reject the wrong.

The Garden of Eden was not a place in space, but a place in time. It represents our childhood years, when everything is magical and perfect. Eviction from Eden represents growing up, the natural tendency to be bitten by the hardships and disappointments of life, to calcify and coarsen. The restoration to Eden takes place when we have children, who reintroduce all the lost Eden-like qualities of childhood into our lives.

Parents today are guilty of believing that they can have healthy children without having a healthy family environment.

Most of us promise ourselves that we will never make the same mistakes as our parents, yet we grow up and almost by osmosis, we start becoming them. We end up transmitting to our children the same imperfections that our parents transmitted to us. It’s a never-ending cycle. And there comes a time in the generational life of a family that one generation has to say, "Enough, I will be healed so that my children will heal." Let that generation be us.

You cannot have healthy children without having a healthy family environment.

There are no bad children. Only bad parents. When our kids act up, it’s time to look in the mirror.

Parents need their children far more than children need their parents.

You are not a hero to the world unless you are first and foremost a hero to your children.

Have you really been successful if the people who mean the most to you, think the least of you?