Raising Real Men

At the reception following Max’s bar mitzvah, the 13-year-old’s father raised the toast, “Today you become an adult … yeah, right.” Everyone laughed, including Max, but clinical psychologists Joseph and Claudia Allen found the contrast between the traditional ceremony and the modern reality very pointed. Their book, Escaping the Endless Adolescence: How We Can Help…
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Several years ago, it occurred to us that maybe the teenaged years didn’t have to be full of anger, rebellion, and sullenness. Just because we went through it or saw it in our friends growing up, does that mean it has to be that way? Is that what you see in the Bible? Through history?…
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Good Morning, Houston! You can hear Hal and Melanie live on 92.3 “The Eagle”, WETX-FM, bright and early Monday morning! We’ll be guests on “OutCast Radio” with Don Campbell in the 7:00 to 7:30 am segment and you can listen online here!

As a writer and freelance journalist, probably 90% of what I do is on the computer – research on the Internet, interviews via email, writing on the word processor, number crunching with spreadsheets, promotion on Facebook. If you go in a college classroom today, you’ll find laptops have replaced notebooks, professors’ websites have replaced handouts,…
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“Boots and Saddles!” the cry rings out and the Youngs come running. We have long used the old cavalry call to tell our children to gather up, it’s time to “ride out” (get in the van and leave . I can’t even remember where we first heard it or when we first started using it,…
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We’re celebrating the official release of Raising Real Men with freebies and contests! I grew up in an entrepreneurial family and I have to confess that when we were first married, I thought it was great that Hal went to work and then came home and was done. Over the years, though, life as an…
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Dear Friends, As many of you old friends know, our baby Katie has an electrical problem in her heart – when we found it when she was two weeks old, her heart rate was 278 beats per minute! We nearly lost her, but God graciously spared her life. Tomorrow she is having a dangerous, but…
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One thing we hear all the time is how hard it is to get boys to “sit down and do schoolwork” and when I look back at the most effective learning we’ve done, it’s been when it was hands-on, hearts-on education. Such as when we toured Civil War sites in Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania on…
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Kathy Brodock of Teaching Good Things says: Raising Real Men should be a regular bed-side read.  It’s practical advice on raising godly young men was such a great reminder!  Mothers, particularly, need to read this book.  There is so much we need to understand about our boys’ differences, and understanding those differences is crucial to their growth…
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We are so excited about the official release of Raising Real Men! This is something we have poured our lives into and it is very exciting to see God using it for His glory. It encourages us to read comments like: “Just received the book over the weekend. By page 2 1/2 of the introduction…
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