Divorce:
Divorce has never been part of my family, and for that I am thankful. But it is part of many people's families. So it is good to look into it and realize the difficulties that come because of it and remarriage.
We looked at the divorce timeline and the things that contributed to it's rise. One of the major things was the new divorce law. This was a no-fault divorce law which made it so that you didn't have to provide evidence of how bad the relationship was. This made it easier to get a divorce, and less embarrassing.
One of the things we talked about was that the average divorced father lives 400 miles away from his 12 year old children. This is due to many reasons but the main one is he has to find a better paying job. Divorce tends to effect the finances negatively of both parents. One of the major factors on the father's income is that now he has to pay child support.
We then talked about the difficulties that are associated with reconstituted families. The second marriage is less likely to make it than the first. This is due to the fact that not only does the couple have all the challenges of a first marriage, they also have many more. One of these challenges is the children. New rules and expectations come with a remarriage. But we learned some steps that can help a family deal with this time.
-It takes at least two years to reach normalcy
-the biological parent needs to handle the heavy discipline
-the step parent needs to take on the role of a good uncle/aunt. One who the child can turn to, and talk to, they also need to give their support to the parent.
-and the parents need to be conferencing together.

Parenting:
Today in class we learned about parenting. I found this subject very interesting because we took a different approach to what I normally hear. We talked about active parenting and how we need to focus on the needs of the child, and not just the negative behaviors.
Which I agree with, it has always bugged me when people talk about how they just want to teach their children to obey, listen, and follow instructions. Because I have always thought that parenting is so much more, we should be trying to teach our children understanding. W want our kids to understand why they are listening, not just doing what we say because "I said so."

Everyone has needs and when our needs are not met we try different things to have them met. The two needs that we talked about in class were contact & belonging and Power. And lets say our need for contact & belonging is not being met. We try to satisfy it with other things like misbehavior or by annoying others. But we can never get enough of what we don't need. So we can be annoying as we can but our need will not be met. And that goes for every need, if we try to satisfy it in the wrong way, no matter how much we try our need will not be met.

I just find this amazing, and it makes me look at parenting differently.