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What You Can Do to Help Build Healthy Marriages in Your Community

1. Your Marriage – What You Can Do:

·  Take stock of your personal priorities to assure that relationships with your spouse and your children are getting the time and attention they need and deserve.

·  Make a public declaration of the importance of your marriage by renewing your wedding vows in the presence of family and friends.

· Invest in the strength of your marriage by participating in premarital counseling before marriage or by skill-building in communication and conflict resolution with your spouse.

· Consider mentoring a younger married couple. Share your experiences and insights on marriage with them, and gain fresh enthusiasm and energy in your own marriage.

      2. How Extended Family Can Help:

·    Be supportive of the marriages in your family. Celebrate anniversaries. Volunteer to baby-sit so your parents, children or siblings can spend time building their marriage. Listen to each other. Share your stories of dating, early marriage, struggles and successes.

·  Role model marriage for the children in your family and peer group. Be an example for those who may not have a healthy marriage relationship modeled in their own home.

· Sponsor married couples in your family on a marriage enrichment weekend.

3. How Churches & Faith-based Groups Can Help:

·    Encourage and equip people to meet high standards of commitment, fidelity, honesty and accountability in their relationships.

·   Provide education on domestic violence.

· Honor and celebrate marriages that have persevered through hard times or long years by encouraging couples to renew their wedding vows as a public testimony of their commitment.

·    Require marriage preparation counseling or courses for all couples getting married in your place of worship.

·   Offer marriage enrichment seminars and classes as special events and ongoing programs in your education plans. Teach couples about the importance of praying together and the benefits they could recognize from such practice.

· Recognize that couples will go through struggles in their marriage. Provide instruction and counseling on conflict resolution. Encourage couples who have experienced hard times and worked through them to mentor couples who are struggling.

·    Sponsor date night on a monthly or bi-monthly basis. Provide children’s activities and supervision so that married couples can share dinner alone and then have some entertainment to conclude the evening.

·  Establish marriage mentoring programs that partner newlyweds with couples who have been married for more than 10 years.

4. How Educators Can Help:

· Present accurate information to students about the psychological, emotional, and physical benefits of healthy marriages.

·    Provide positive examples of marriage to students, since some may not see marriages modeled at home or in their communities.

5. How Businesses Can Help:

· Recognize that your employees are husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, and members of extended families and communities, even while they are at work. Reflect that understanding in your personnel practices and policies.

·    Make efforts to minimize the time an employee spends away from his or her family by exploring flextime options, reducing overtime, and cutting back on work-related travel when and where possible.

·  Offer resources to your employees – books, tapes, videos, or seminars that deal with family topics such as marriage/relationship building, family finances, effective parenting and child development.

6. How Government Can Help:

·   Adopt the standard that all legislation and policies must “First, do no harm” to the strength and integrity of marriage and families. Examine all legislation for its impact on marriage and family.

Thanks to First Things First for this information.