If you are a single parent, make friends with others in similar situations and develop friendships with married couples. Counsel with your priesthood leaders. Let them know of your needs and wants. Single parenthood is understood by the Lord.
Interpretation
Single parents should seek connections with others in similar situations to find support and understanding.
This quote emphasizes the importance of community and support for single parents. Ezra Taft Benson encourages single parents to form friendships with others who understand their challenges and to seek guidance from spiritual leaders, reinforcing the idea that their struggles are recognized and supported by a higher power.
In practice
In a community support group for single parents, we discussed how to develop friendships with families.
Humility responds to God's will-to the fear of His judgments and to the needs of those around us. To the proud, the applause of the world rings in their ears; to the humble, the applause of heaven warms their hearts. Someone has said, "Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man."
Physical well-being is not only a priceless asset to oneself-it is a heritage to be passed on. With good health, all other activities of life are greatly enhanced. A clean mind in a healthy body enables one to render far more effective service to others. It helps one provide more vigorous leadership. It gives our every experience in life more zest and more meaning. Robust health is a noble and worthwhile attainment.
If you really want to receive joy and happiness, then serve others with all your heart. Lift their burden, and your own burden will be lighter.
Our parents deserve our honor and respect for giving us life itself. Beyond this they almost always made countless sacrifices as they cared for and nurtured us through our infancy and childhood, provided us with the necessities of life, and nursed us through physical illnesses and the emotional stresses of growing up.
We are an overfed and undernourished nation digging an early grave with our teeth.
Every man eventually is backed up to the wall of faith, and there he must make his stand.
The gift my mother gave me was the gift of possibility. From an early age, she instilled in me a belief that I could do anything I wanted to do. It wasn't a matter of, 'Can I?' or 'Should I?' It was just, 'You can, you must, you will!' She wanted me to believe that anything was possible.
The lack of emotional security of our American young people is due, I believe, to their isolation from the larger family unit. No two people - no mere father and mother - as I have often said, are enough to provide emotional security for a child. He needs to feel himself one in a world of kinfolk, persons of variety in age and temperament, and yet allied to himself by an indissoluble bond which he cannot break if he could, for nature has welded him into it before he was born.
Parenting is an impossible job at any age.
I got a lot of support from my parents. That's the one thing I always appreciated. They didn't tell me I was being stupid; they told me I was being funny.
To maintain a joyful family requires much from both the parents and the children. Each member of the family has to become, in a special way, the servant of the others.
Our child benefit goes directly to the families who need it the most.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.