We recently wrote a book for moms about the unique and vital role dads play in parenting. It's called Make Room for Daddy: A Mom's Guide to Letting Dad Be Dad. In researching the book, we questioned hundreds of moms and dads about the differences between mothers and fathers, and what dads need most in order to be the best dads they can be.

Bottom line (you like to get to the bottom line, don't you?), you can help your wife to help you by telling her about your needs as a father. These "Five Talking Points About Fathering" should get you started: read more

For Christians, the worst consequence of vulgarity's ubiquity may be the influence upon children.

"All children, whether they swear or not, learn what the words are that they're not supposed to use," says author Timothy Jay, who also is a psychology professor at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts.

Sometimes teens must learn that words matter by going too far, such as being kicked out of a restaurant or fired from a job for using vulgarity, Jay says. Yet enforcing rules is more difficult when many of the rich and powerful--movie stars, athletes and politicians--use vulgar words with impunity.

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Serendipity means to find something unexpected when we are looking for something else. Perhaps we put on a coat and find money in the pocket from the previous year. For me, it was finding a letter I had written to my wife, Nancy, years ago but had never given to her.

I was going through some files a month after our 54th wedding anniversary when I found it. I had written the letter decades earlier after counseling a couple determined to divorce. After they left my office I considered what it would be like to divorce Nancy and wrote her the following letter: read more

7:00PM EST 2/28/2001

Before you judge your wife for letting herself go, take a good look at the man in your mirror.

Sometimes it's physical--wrinkles and sagging body parts. Other times a raging boredom sets in. Sometimes it's a career that goes awry. Sometimes it's just a simple unhappiness with the way your life is turning out. A man looks at his wife one morning and thinks, Maybe I should trade in my 40 for two 20s.

Forty percent of first marriages eventually end in divorce. Will yours? Many of these dissolutions take place during midlife. read more

8:00PM EDT 4/30/2004

What can the shtick-slinging comedic candor of married TV characters teach us about women?

In all the push to become the knight in shining armor rescuing his beauty, it might be good to let our reality catch up with our fantasy. The bad news is none of us are Brad Pitt, but, apparently, the good news is that we don't have to be.

A female friend and I had an interesting conversation recently about what women really want from men. Much of what she told me was in reaction to the popular paradigm that a man should approach a woman as a rescuer. This was all good and fine, she said, but the knight-in-shining-armor caricature is more of a male fantasy than a female fantasy. read more

8:00PM EDT 4/30/2004

New Man's resident comedy writer explains chick flicks, shopping, menopause and childbirth. Be afraid ... be very afraid.

After years of exhaustive research, scientists have recently concluded that, due to a bunch of comp-licated factors involving X and Y chromosomes, men and women have completely different genders.

The full story was published in the October edition of a medical journal called Duh! read more

8:00PM EDT 4/30/2004

Both men and women are giving up on commitment to one another, let alone an ideal marriage. What can we do to reverse this growing trend?

The gender wars are not new. They have just changed form.

Part of the result of Adam and Eve's attempt at independent power from God was His pronouncement that there would be a power struggle between the woman and the man. read more

8:00PM EDT 4/30/2004