weddingsponsors, preparation, babies, shared environments 8/18/99

[owner-smartmarriages]

from: Smart Marriages

Philadelphia Couple Sells Ads to Finance Wedding  12.11 p.m. ET (1611 
GMT) August 15, 1999 

 PHILADELPHIA ‹ Talk about a marriage of love and money. Tom Anderson and 
his bride Sabrina Root paid for their $34,000 wedding this weekend by 
selling advertising space at the ceremony and reception.

Everything from the wedding rings to a week at a penthouse in Cancun, 
Mexico, were donated after Anderson got 24 companies to sponsor the 
nuptials in exchange for having their names appear six times from the 
invitations to the thank-you cards.

Anderson, 24, a bartender, did cough up his own money for his wife's 
$1,400 engagement ring, while Root, 33, a hair stylist, paid $1,600 for 
her dress.

The groom got the idea of corporate sponsorships while working in a small 
struggling animation studio that often had to barter for services.

"So I was in a sales mode, and I got to thinking," he told the 
Philadelphia Inquirer, which ran a photo of the couple sitting among 
their corporate-sponsored wedding "gifts" in its Sunday editions.

The bride drew the line at having advertising banners draped across the 
aisle. But her perfume came from a local Oscar de la Renta distributor, 
and the coffee was provided gratis from a neighborhood supplier.

Advertisers had their names appear on the invitations and thank-you 
cards, on cards at the buffet, on scrolls at the dinner table, in an ad 
placed in a local independent newspaper and in a verbal "thank you" that 
followed the first toast.

The Inquirer said the groom had bought two addresses on the Internet's 
World Wide Web, namely: sponsoredwedding.com and weddingsponsors.com. 

*********
This is a question and response from Scott Stanley
Dear Scott, 
Our governing board is being tested in it's resolve to hold to the 
standard 
in the face of church families wanting their kids married in a shorter 
time 
than we've set in our policy. We're being criticized as being "rigid". 
 We're looking for positive examples of how other churches promote their 
programs. - Paul 

Dear Paul, 
This raises all sorts of interesting questions.  But my initial reaction 
is 
perhaps the most appropriate:  why do these parents want their children's 
marriages to be at greater risk?  Three cheers for your board for making 
couples slow down and think things through.  In my most cynical moments, 
I 
believe that even if most of what was done premaritally in churches 
preparation- 
wise was not effective (and I actually, do lean toward believing this, 
but 
this depends on the degree to which programs are targeting and reducing 
real 
risk factors), I think making couples go more slowly will 
reduce divorce rates (because some of these couples who should not get 
married will figure that out with more time).  

In the best case, the church pushes the couples not only to work though 
issues, but slows them down, makes them think longer term on planning (if 
they want to work with this church in particular--if not, they can go 
down 
the street, and often will), and at best, puts them through some material 
that 
is more likely to have actual beneficial effect (e.g., PREPARE or FOCCUS
then PREP or Christian PREP, etc).  

So, I guess my sentiments are pretty clear.  A big reason we have so 
many divorces and failed marriages in our country is so many couples are 
not 
taking the transition as seriously as it warrants.  So, what I might do 
is 
have your board more carefully craft a response to parents and couples 
about 
WHY you are doing what you do, and why you believe it's best for these 
couples' marriages, and then with all positivity and conviction, sticking 
to 
your guns. 

Does that help?  I hope so.  Best wishes.  This is not an easy path to 
walk 
because you are running against the tide of the culture.  

Scott Stanley
***********

>From Diane:  I just listened to The Becoming Parents Program tape/Pam 
Jordan #508.  You MUST
get this one and YOU must see that such a program is implemented in your 
community.  It's a no-brainer. It teaches marital skills to couples when 
they are most in need of them - and most receptive.  The courses can be 
taught in churches, community centers, public
or private hospitals. Marital satisfaction drops for 75% of couples 
around the birth of the first baby - the event which precipitates more 
separations and divorce than any other event - 3 months before and 3 
months after the birth.
This doesn't have to be....it's because there is more to disagree about, 
disagreements carry more weight, and couples need conflict management 
skills more than before.  Get the training yourself (3 day training) and 
start providing it, or see to it that someone in your community does 
this.  It's the perfect intervention at one of the obvious marriage 
make-it-or-break it points and a necessary part of any community marriage 
strengthening effort.  Jordan spells it out in this 90 minutes and you 
realize that you can do this - the book and tapes make it easy -  and 
that it must be done.    ( the tape of this workshop is
$10 from 800-241-7785)  
*************
I clipped this off another list.  This article seems lots more significant
than the deconstructing the essential father piece...."the results show 
that shared environment may account for as much as 50% of the variance in 
important child outcomes."  

Another article has come out in a psychology journal
that I wanted to bring to your attention.  The reference is:
 
Stoolmiller, M. (1999). Implications of the restricted range
of family environments for estimates of heritability and
nonshared environment in behavior-genetic adoption
studies. PSYCHOLOGICAL BULLETIN, 125, 392-409.
 
To give a rough summary of the article, influences on 
behavior can be divided into genetic, shared family 
environment, and nonshared environment.  Previously,
adoption-based studies have suggested that genetic
and nonshared environmental influences account for
most of the variance in child outcomes such as IQ and 
problem behaviors.  Some scholars have taken the
relative lack of variance due to shared environment and
concluded that parents and families are unimportant to
child development.  Stoolmiller notes that the statistical
problem of range restriction may be systematically
leading to underestimation of shared environmental
effects.  In general, range restriction of a variable will
lead to lower correlations of that variable with other
variables, than if the full range of the variable were
represented.  Stoolmiller goes on to argue that, for
various reasons, adoptive home environments used
in research studies exhibit such range restriction.
When statistical corrections for range restriction are
implemented, the results show that shared environment
may account for as much as 50% of the variance in 
important child outcomes.
 



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