We're here to help. A major purpose of The Good News magazine is to share with you practical, workable solutions to the problems of everyday life.

One area that definitely needs help is the family. The overwhelming pressures against it seem insurmountable. The family is surrounded and beleaguered on all fronts, from media to finances to school and finally by the subtle undermining of culture. Can these influences be counteracted?

Media pressures are enormous. Television is slowly but surely poisoning the family with amoral influences and toxic trends that redefine family roles even as they destroy them. Traditional family values are ridiculed while single life is promoted as the modern norm. Father once knew best; now he's lucky to be noticed—and when he is, he's often the object of ridicule.

Movies, music and television undermine traditional values by promoting sex, drugs and violence. Boys are encouraged to wear gang clothing; girls are influenced to wear next to none.

Educational systems subvert traditional values by removing God and godly morals from the classroom and replacing them with evolution, simultaneously ridiculing religion and morality. As if TV, movies and music weren't bad enough influences, sex education and free birth control in schools only encourage sexual activity and experimentation even more. Condoms, not control, is the message children are given.

Sadly, it only gets worse as our teens grow up and go away to college or university. There, away from home, overwhelmingly liberal faculties (not to mention overwhelming social pressures) continue a subtle, subversive assault on traditional family values.

What's the end result of this witches' brew of antifamily factors? Nearly half of U.S. marriages now end in divorce. Increasingly, many couples never even bother to marry. Precious babies grow up in almost-families; kids are never quite sure that Mom or Dad won't move out or be replaced by a new live-in lover.

Remarkably, some government policies and programs actually penalize marriage. Married couples may face higher tax rates simply because they're married (the "marriage penalty"), while some antipoverty programs and even social security punish those who marry by cutting benefits.

The One who created marriage and the family (Genesis 2:24) says that human beings, left to their own human reasoning, are headed to self-destruction (see, for example, Genesis 6:5-6; Proverbs 16:25; Matthew 24:21-22). The prophet Jeremiah tells us that human nature, the same nature that creates and perpetuates all external and internal family pressures, is incurable (Jeremiah 17:9).

However, our Creator can change human nature, and with His help you can have a direct hand in changing it! When it is changed, many of these pressures on the family will be reduced significantly.

How can we counteract these very real, very dangerous pressures on the family? We encourage you to read the information in this issue and then put it to work in your life. Your family can win the war being waged against it! GN