CHILDREN AND MARRIAGE

Your teen leaves his dirty clothes all over the house. Instead of getting into another fight with him or nagging him to pick them up, you do it for him. It’s easier, right? Your daughter with ADD is having problems completing her science project. She can’t seem to focus and complains that it’s boring and too difficult. After she goes to sleep, you finish it for her. After all, you don’t want her to fail.

Contrary to popular belief, divorce isn't always negative for kids — sometimes it's excellent for kids. Here are five ways that your children can benefit from your divorce.

Who didn't sing that annoying little elementary school song as a kid? " First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage!" It seems that celebrity couple Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt did not follow the path laid out in that teasing grade-school tune or what has been considered the traditional "rule" for a couple: you fall in love, get married and then have babies.

"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation." - Oscar Wilde Hello. I want you to think for a moment about why you want marriage and children and why you think it's important. Meditate on it for a while, and you will realize that you don't really know why. And neither do most people. If you ask most people, they will simply say "because it's an important part of life" but they cannot explain WHY.

They say that marriage gets more difficult once you have children. It can be tougher to find the time and energy for connection and romance. It can also be a challenge when you and your spouse have a disagreement and you don't make time to be alone and resolve it . You might have uncomfortable or even traumatic memories of your own childhood listening to the adults in your house argue and fight. The yelling and anger may have sent you racing to your room where you hid underneath a blanket or turned up the volume on your stereo to drown out the raised voices.

Six simple steps to keeping your marriage truthful and harmonious. Because when you hold things in, eventually they tumble back out. "You start to resent your partner, and you start to resent yourself," said Dr. Kudak. "If you’re not happy with yourself and your partner, you're not going to be happy in your relationship. And your marriage can deteriorate when that happens."

Every year, millions of children grieve over their parents' divorce, but new research says that the experience can compromise their math scores and friendships as well.

You know that passion you have at the beginning of a relationship? When every moment is about getting closer to each other and nothing is more important than seeing that person naked? How nothing else matters, not food or shelter or work? Yeah, that intensity is kind of hard to maintain.

Economist Bryan Caplan, author of Selfish Reasons to Have Kids, offers a suggestion for parents that sounds at once obvious and dangerous in today's hyper-parented society: want to be a happier parent? Back off from parenting. Helicopter parenting, that is. Rather than feeling as if you need to hover about your child at all waking moments, if you feel your own sanity starting to slip: put on a DVD, call the babysitter, and spend some time on your personal needs

We heard it might happen. . . some were certain it would. As we walked down the aisle to become Husband and Wife – bound together in a true soul partnership, we heard from other “childless by choice couples” that we’d lose friends over this lifestyle decision. We thought, “Okay, maybe those peripheral friends, those ones we see only a couple times a year at best.”

The latest research on happiness isn't so jolly: Great Britain's Understanding Society finds that happiness in marriage declines with age. Older couples are less content than their younger counterparts, while young, childless couples are the happiest of them all.

My niece and her husband just had their first baby, so I sent them a restaurant gift card, with a note: "Use this. Soon. Just you two." I know what I'm talking about.

Josh Duhamel says he's ready to start a family with his wife, Black Eyed Peas singer Fergie, and that he'd be thrilled with a Brangelina-sized brood. "I'm happy with one, but I'll take seven," Josh said on Saturday.

Changing your last name for marriage is a big decision, here are 10 pros and cons to help you decide. Many of us spent our childhood years doodling our names with the "Mrs." pronoun into the margins of our diaries. We experimented with our crushes' names, imagined ourselves with famous names (Mrs. DiCaprio, anybody?), or dreamed up names that were completely random altogether. Now that we're a little more seasoned and—hopefully—more in tune with our sense of individuality, we figure that changing our last name for marriage isn't newlywed protocol.

You and me and baby makes three, or four in the case of the celeb super-star family headed up by Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. But it's not enough for Ben, whom In Touch Weekly reports (via celebitchy.com) is suffering from "estrogen overload." A lesser man might settle for a cat, but not Ben: desperate for a son to call his own, he and Jen are now apparently consulting fertility doctors to produce a male heir. While Ben's longing is completely understandable, to some it might seem that employing the kind of high-tech sex-selection techniques that fertility doctors offer might border on extreme.