September 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” which proclaims that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”
On this episode of the Church News podcast, reporter Mary Richards continues the discussion of “The Family Proclamation,” as she is joined by Jenet Erickson, an associate professor of Religious Education at Brigham Young University.
Erickson teaches, researches and presents on the family as a fellow of both the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. Together they discuss the divine design of the family, mothers’ well-being and how the proclamation’s principles promote family stability and happiness.
Listen to this episode of the Church News podcast on Apple Podcasts, Amazon, Spotify, bookshelf PLUS, YouTube or wherever you get podcasts.
Transcript:
Jenet Erickson: We are designed for love. We’re designed to experience love eternally. This is joy. And that is grounded in family relationships, mothers, fathers, children bound together eternally. I think it’s so beautiful. I’ve taught the proclamation for years and years now, and every time I read or recite it, I marvel at what it offers. From a research standpoint, it literally in nine paragraphs gives us hundreds, if not thousands, of research studies, what they illustrate. It actually lays out who we are and the divine design of our heavenly parents for our growth and development. And it lays out how, through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can all participate in sacred ordinances and covenants that bring us back to the presence of God and bind us in eternal relationships forever. That is what the proclamation gives us.
1:11
Mary Richards: This is Mary Richards, reporter at the Church News. Welcome to the Church News podcast. Today, we are taking you on a journey of connection as we discuss news and events of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
September 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of “The Family: A Proclamation to the World,” which proclaims that “marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God and that the family is central to the Creator’s plan for the eternal destiny of His children.”
Jenet Erickson is a BYU associate professor who teaches and does research on the family and presents frequently on covenant relationships. She is a research fellow of both the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies, and she is married and has two children.
Welcome, Jenet, to the Church News podcast.
Jenet Erickson: Thank you, Mary. It’s so good to be here.
2:10
Mary Richards: This 30th anniversary — tell me your thoughts about that. What do you remember from that Relief Society general meeting when President Gordon B. Hinckley read the proclamation on the family to the world?
Jenet Erickson: I remember where I was sitting and that it was remarkable that at the end of this women’s meeting, President Gordon B. Hinckley stood up with a message for the whole world, but given to the women first, and that it felt significant to him, and hence significant to God and to all of us. I was not studying family at the time. I remember thinking, as we always did when President Hinckley spoke, there was power in his message, and something powerful and significant about this, but I had no idea then how important every sentence in that proclamation would be to me in my own study and understanding of the family.
3:01
Mary Richards: In ’95, I was in high school, and I remember thinking, “Well, of course, this is all true. This makes sense.” But in the years since, and with your research, how have you seen how prophetic this proclamation is?
Jenet Erickson: Yeah, I think all of us had that same feeling, like, “Oh, there’s nothing really unique or standout. Why the need to make a statement like that? Doesn’t everyone sort of already know this?” But who could have foreseen that just in a few years, even, significant questions about the very core structure of family — marriage itself, the need for children, wanting children, why family needed to be structured the way that it is — all of those questions would be up for debate. And certainly in our time, we’ve seen some of the fallout, the implications, of that natural unit being disrupted.
3:53
Mary Richards: The September issue for 2025 of the Liahona magazine is all about this 30th anniversary of the family proclamation. And I wanted to read a quote from the magazine, from President Russell M. Nelson in this issue. He said, “Pivotal to God’s plan is the family. In fact, a purpose of the plan is to exalt the family. The earth was created so that we as premortal spirit children of our Father in Heaven could come to the earth and obtain physical bodies. We are here to be tried and tested. We are here to ‘choose liberty and eternal life … or to choose captivity and death’ (2 Nephi 2:27). And best of all, we are allowed to fall in love, to be married and to invite children into our families.”
To see our Prophet continuing to speak about the family, marriage, parenthood, children, the Father’s plan, really. What are your thoughts when you hear those teachings from President Nelson?
4:48
Jenet Erickson: Yeah, Mary. Throughout my career studying family, the truths that are laid out in the proclamation — whether it’s that marriage matters, when we look at humanity’s need for that primeval institution that binds men and women to the children that they have and then protects the well-being of those children — there’s no question marriage is the core of society. There’s no question that adherence to what we would call the law of chastity, that fidelity within marriage, fidelity before, is important for human well-being. There’s no question that mothers offer something different from fathers. All of this we can see societally, and it’s upheld in thousands of research studies on human well-being.
But what President Nelson offers us is this expanded view that this family institution that matters so much now is actually divine, and it’s essential to the plan. It’s the reason we are, because we have a father and a mother, and their work is to enable us to grow so that we can live in the quality of relationships that they have as father and mother. So it’s like the whole plan is grounded in this reality of the family. If there weren’t the family, there would be no plan.
I think Sister Julie B. Beck says that so powerfully that the Creation, the Fall and the Atonement of Jesus Christ, those core pillars of the plan of salvation, are all about the family. And so he just offers something way beyond what we can see throughout mortality, which is that these structures matter, devotion and commitment and fidelity, mothers and fathers to children, matters. This is far bigger. This is an eternal design.
6:35
Mary Richards: And you have spoken about that design, divine design, and how we are designed for relationships. These devotionals you’ve given at BYU, BYU–Idaho, BYU–Hawaii, BYU–Pathway Worldwide, Ensign College, other places, tell me about speaking to young adults, but also many others, like me listening to those devotionals and that message about how we are designed for relationships. We’re not designed to be alone.
7:00
Jenet Erickson: Yeah. It’s so remarkable, Mary, I think striking for me, even in the last five years, to watch the epidemic of loneliness, this choosing of isolation. And it’s an international, in a sense, epidemic. And what it shows us is we as human beings — though the culture would tell us that the ideal life is autonomous, pleasure seeking, it’s to be free of obligations to others, it’s to be able to choose at will what you want to do — in fact, it’s left us starving and hungry for what we in our core need and are, and that is that we need strong core relationships.
So I think it stunned the world when that 75-year Harvard grant study, after 75 years of tracking what is it that contributes to well-being, these men followed for 75 years, the conclusion was: Happiness is love, full stop. And you just think that is who we are. That is actually who God is. We are part of an eternal family. We are designed for deep relationships eternally. That’s what Christ’s whole atoning work is, to bring at-one-ment in our relationships, and that’s where we will find eternal joy. And so, we just are designed that way, and anything that tells us otherwise is a distortion about who we really are and where happiness lies.
8:27
Mary Richards: That distortion, I try to talk to my children about this many times — in fact, if they’re listening now, they’re going to roll their eyes — but I always say, “Listen, Satan doesn’t have a body or a family, so he’s attacking those things.” And so that’s something I try to help them, as they look at the messages they’re being fed, who really is behind that message?
8:46
Jenet Erickson: Yes, yes. No, there’s no question that — but it’s hard for the ego, right? I remember hearing wonderful professors say one time, “The natural man is an enemy” — quoting King Benjamin (see Mosiah 3:19) — “is an enemy to relationships.” In some ways, we resist, we resist the fear of the ego that wants to self-protect and compete with and make sure, “I’m safe” can fear what we actually are designed for and need, which is intimacy.
And so, within the deepest connection. And that’s what marriage is actually designed to facilitate, a commitment that is lasting, so that you can learn to be seen and known and loved, and you can learn to see and know and love. And then to bring children into that who you are a participant with God in helping create, what could be more deeply intimate? But the natural self, I think, the opposition that we experience in mortality, really part of that is to resist what it means to be in deep connection and intimacy with others.
9:53
Mary Richards: These are issues, like you’ve talked about, that face the world. Earlier this year, you were in Belgium for the European Family Policy Conference. Why does this matter so much around the world? And how wonderful was that to be with others and talking about these topics?
Jenet Erickson: Yes, so remarkable to be in the middle of European Union efforts and also broader international questions. And we’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to counter these energies, whether it’s through technology that divides us or separates us from our embodiment and from relationships, or it’s just not appreciating the importance of the connection of man and woman in marriage.
We’re all dealing with the same things. But the truth is that children desperately need, in order to thrive, they need the committed devotion of the mother and father who gave them life. And that wholeness that is designed through God’s ordaining of marriage is what leads to wholeness in our development as individuals. And whether or not that’s socially the norm or not, it’s just true.
So, I’ll never forget when Elder [D. Todd] Christofferson quoted Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian who ended up being incarcerated and was killed at the end of World War II. He writes a letter from prison to a niece who’s getting married. He can’t be there. And in the letter, he says, “In your marriage, you see only your two selves, the love that you have. But in your marriage, you are placed at a post of responsibility to the world.”
And when I think, when I look at all of the data — and recently, we’ve had Melissa Kearney come out with her book “The Two-Parent Privilege,” we have literally hundreds of studies, even thousands, that illustrate that the powerful trajectory for children, positive trajectory, is shaped by the wholeness of the marriage into which they are born.
And so, protecting that and honoring it is what Bonhoeffer is saying. He’s saying, “You think this is about just your love, and it really is a post of responsibility to the world, because your commitment and devotion to one another as man and woman, your care for one another and for your children, is what will build the foundations of well-being for these human beings.”
12:13
Mary Richards: I’ve heard it said that children learn so much by how their parents treat each other, how their father treats their mother, those kinds of examples. They feel more secure, don’t they, in seeing that love and commitment in the marriage of their parents, because they are a product of that marriage, of that union.
12:31
Jenet Erickson: Yes. It’s so interesting — the proclamation talks about the responsibilities that we have to children, but it begins that by saying husbands and wives “have a solemn responsibility to love and care for each other and for their children.” And so at the heart of family is just what you’ve described. It’s what Sister Elaine Dalton would say: What is the best thing a father could do for his daughter? Love and care for her mother.
That’s why the proclamation, when it says marriage, the first thing it says is, “Marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God,” and the family is central. The marriage is the seed from which the family springs. It is the core from which the family springs. And so you are exactly right. I think that devotion and commitment, fidelity, love, care, sacrifice for in marriage is what will lay the foundations for strength in a child’s sense of security and sense of well-being.
13:27
Mary Richards: You’ve done and seen all this research on children, and we can keep talking about that, but this immediately brought to mind the topic of mothers’ well-being. We are both mothers. This is also something you’ve looked at too.
How does marriage and motherhood affect the well-being of women?
13:43
Jenet Erickson: Yeah, this is such an important question, Mary, because I see this in my students. I understand the feelings myself to some degree. We live at a time when women, even women who have grown up with an orientation to family, see marriage and motherhood as a transition of loss — loss of identity, loss of autonomy, of fear that they won’t be an equal. And I think all of these are important questions to wrestle with. It’s why that powerful line in the proclamation that says [fathers and mothers] “are obligated to help one another as equal partners.”
Our understanding of marriage in the Church of Jesus Christ is one of complete and full equality. From the foundations, the Creation, the earth was created that Adam and Eve could be placed on the earth. The metaphor in scripture is as ribs, because that is the most beautiful parallel element of the body to show their equality, not one ahead, not one behind, absolute equals in guarding the essence of life together. And so, we do live at a time when that restored understanding of marriage is desperately needed.
Now, this is the interesting thing about women today. So, there can be a fear that marriage is a transition of loss and children are a transition of loss. Yet all the research consistently shows that the happiest women are married mothers. And it’s by a long ways. It’s important to their well-being. It’s important to the sense of connection. Our most recent data looked at touch. We are in a dearth of touch because of technology. And what we can see is that human beings embodied need touch. And who are those that are most likely to be experiencing touch? It’s married mothers through marriage and through their children.
And so, counter to the narrative — this idea that happier is single, untethered by relationships — what we find out is it’s us bound in those core relationships and that motherhood is an unbelievable privilege of intimacy with another human being who, quite literally, you will be their entire world. Nothing else is like that in the world but motherhood. And marriage really is critical to her experience of motherhood.
A father cannot replace a mother, but a father gives strength, support, structure, protection, provisioning that enables her to do the most sacred work in time and eternity, which is to nurture life. And so what we find out is, right, marriage matters a lot for women in their experience of motherhood. We need to make it likely that women experience the strength and power of strong marriages. But motherhood is an unbelievably nourishing, flourishing experience for women, in spite of the narrative.
16:39
Mary Richards: When I was in second grade, the teacher asked us all to draw a picture of what we wanted to be when we grew up. And I still remember our classroom, there was an astronaut, there was a teacher, there was a police officer, and then there was my picture, and it was I wanted to be a mother. And I am so grateful that I had that dream come true. I have five children and this husband who helps me in all those ways that you said.
I think about how I came to that, and I think it was because of the example of my mother. She showed me how much she loved being a mother, that she’d wanted children, that this was something that was important to her. How can we, then, as women, show these examples to the young women around us who, like you said of the world, they’re getting these messages that it might not be the best thing.
And how do we show them that it is something to be desired and to want to do?
17:32
Jenet Erickson: Yeah, beautiful. I think none of us will forget when President Russell M. Nelson said, “I couldn’t be a mother.” That’s what he wanted. “So I chose to be a doctor.” And this honoring by our Prophet of the greatest work on this earth. Now, I say that with some tenderness, because I didn’t know that I would be able to become a mother. I yearned to marry, like many do today. I couldn’t seem to make that happen. I didn’t know exactly where I fit in a plan of marriage and motherhood if I couldn’t experience that.
And what I can say is that the women I have known in my life who have remained single longer than I did have been an incredible force for nurturing in the world. And it’s not something that a man can do in the same way, we as women. Mothers, whether or not we are literal mothers from birth, are called to that work of our relational capacity, our sense of nurturing, our sense of orientation to the generation that follows us. All of that is the powerful capacity of women, regardless of our biological motherhood.
Then to think in addition, however, when you study that attachment relationship, and you see an infant emerge from the womb and they have to fulfill one task, they absolutely have to bond in a relationship of deep emotional connection. And quite literally, for a year and a half, she will, through her eyes, through her touch, build the foundations of the identity for that child. The right brain will double in size. She will build it, and she will be the entire world of that child. And she will carry the infant’s cells in her body for as long as we can measure. And the infant will carry her cells within their body, because there’s this microchimerism process through which they cross that barrier.
And so quite literally, this child will be in her heart for the rest of her life, and that child’s mother will be in her heart. And so I think we just, to value the depth of connection, as imperfect as it is — because I’m not sure that I actually communicate the joy of motherhood to my children as much; I adore them, but my anxiety or tenseness or whatever, they might not hear that always, even though there’s no question that’s the essence. But as imperfect as we are, to just value the immeasurable privilege that it is to be that deeply connected to another human being. And that’s what motherhood means.
20:11
Mary Richards: And what about maybe a mother who’s struggling or maybe not feeling that joy? It’s hard for her.
Jenet Erickson: You mean somebody who’s wiping noses all day and who is trying to figure out where their mind is in that whole experience? Then yeah, that’s me. And I talked about motherhood for a long time before I became a mother, and there’s no question that it is a work of faith. Because it’s interesting — the brain, you can feel like the brain that you’re used to using is no longer being used in the same way, even though your brain is actually working very hard in creating a bond and a relationship that’s essential, but you’re not processing it in the same way.
And that can be — and just the mundane of it, the never feeling like you’re cleaned up or dressed up, or that you have personal space, or that you get to sleep, or you’re tired, you know you should be caring, and you love this person, but you’re so irritable because this is how it is. And so, what’s interesting in our study is we find out that mothers of children, married mothers of children, are the most exhausted. They’re the ones who say they have the least amount of time. But they’re also the ones who would say they’re experiencing the most purposefulness and meaning in their lives when it comes right down to it.
And it’s like we have to shift into a different framing. That’s not easy, where we allow ourselves to value that we get to be in an intimate connection with this human being, and they desperately need us, and that’s a privilege, even as it is a burden also. Now, I think it’s important, I think, in that whole experience, to just realize that — I love this story of a really renowned writer in D.C., and she ends up getting diagnosed with terminal cancer, and they would say she was the most talented analyst of the work inside the beltway of anybody, a writer. And her last writing post is nothing about D.C. It’s about her 9- and 11-year-old child who she just helped get ready for Halloween from her bed.
And what it tells us is, at the end of it all, what we will yearn for around us are these relationships that we have built. They are not easy. They will break us, Mary. I think our experience of motherhood and marriage will break us. It’s designed, in a sense, to enable us to experience a broken heart and a contrite spirit in the deepest form of intimacy. We will be very imperfect at it. We will fail our children. We will do things we wish we hadn’t. And yet, in it all, in the end, it will be the greatest meaning, the greatest privilege, the essence of our experience. So, there she is. She writes about that last post, her offering to the world, was about these children who meant everything to her.
23:12
Mary Richards: We pray the most for our children at nighttime, we regret things during the day. I think what helps me the most is looking back for the hand of the Lord, really, but looking for the good. If it’s been a hard day and I’m just at night thinking, “Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,” or this or that, or “Help my son with this or that,” when I start to look for the good, it really is changing me.
And I love what you’re saying, because I immediately thought about: Where is our growth and change without sacrifice? How do we become more like the Savior without developing charity and virtue and all these things?
23:46
Jenet Erickson: Yes, yes. So, I keep thinking that the whole story of the Book of Mormon, this story of the gathering, is about the story of Christ redeeming the family. It’s like a thousands of years’ process where He is gathering the family and healing the family. And so, we give our all in these relationships. We’re enabled to grow through it, to see ourselves painfully, sometimes, and we can trust He is redeeming it.
And so I think so often that beautiful statement from President Russell M. Nelson, where he says that the circumstances of our lives have little to do with our happiness. It’s riveting our eyes on the Lord Jesus Christ, His redeeming work, and then that He gives us the privilege to be part of it and mess up and be restored and to have these children forever, and that they can be healed from our mistakes, and we can be healed from our mistakes, and yet we got the chance to be that deeply connected. And if, I think, we can rivet our eyes on Him, we’ll know He will redeem me and them and the whole family in joy.
24:55
Mary Richards: Yeah. You’re making me wish my children were here and I could smell their heads and give them a little squeeze. I think, oh, I am so grateful for them. Yes, it’s hard, but it is so joyful, too.
I want to also ask you, because we have some listening, we have some on our staff who want to be married. They want to have children. They greatly desire this, and it has not yet happened for them. And many of us have members of our families or our wards whose circumstances are not what they wanted either, for various issues with family or with marriage.
So what kind of hope or words can you give them in this podcast?
25:30
Jenet Erickson: Yeah. I think none of us will forget when Sharon Eubank told the story of the oak tree, her own mourning for what she was designed to be, her yearning to give her life for the creation of others and recognizing that would not be fulfilled in mortality. And I can’t help but think of a dear friend who experiences same-sex attraction who also wonders if that will be the story of his life and yet yearns for it, to hang the stockings at Christmastime, to be the father that the children would look to. And I love how those in that experience will teach me, like Sister Eubank did, the power of laying on the altar of God our deepest yearnings.
And that’s true for all of us — in my experience of not being married, of infertility, of parents feeling like they failed in family life, that dreams have not been met. So often, what the Lord invites us to do is lay our dreams on His altar, and what we find out is He is the way maker. Sharon Eubank is a woman of profound joy and such a purposeful life. My dear friends that experience same-sex attraction have found immeasurable joy in the Lord Jesus Christ, and that He gives to them answers to the yearnings of their heart in ways only God can know.
And it won’t be exactly as we picture for any of us. I don’t think that it will. And that’s part of what that gap of faith in trusting the Redeemer, who will eventually give more than we could have ever imagined. So I can hear the Prophet Joseph stand in Nauvoo not too long before he’s killed, and with power bear witness at the funeral of a child and the funeral of his own brother, Don Carlos, and say, “By the power of the Almighty, I have seen it. All our losses will be made up. All our losses will be restored, if we will hold to Him.”
And I think that is what we look to, the promises seen afar off and the joy that we could not any pain we have known will be so remarkably restored in a fullness of joy that we will just stand in awe of the goodness of God. That’s who He is. And along the way, we will have learned so much about how to be charitable, how to be meek, how to be a Christ-filled person. And that’s what we need here. It actually isn’t about all of our dreams coming true here. That’s part of the next act.
28:16
Mary Richards: I was thinking about Sister Sheri Dew’s talk “Are We Not All Mothers?” Somebody else who had wanted that in her life. And you mentioned earlier in this podcast about how women are nurturers, and Sister Dew talked about that aspect of being a woman, of nurturing. And then men have roles and things that they do that are different. These are truths in the family proclamation, that men and women are different, and they were born sons and daughters of God. These things are also challenged today.
28:48
Jenet Erickson: Yes. I love in her talk, Sister Sheri Dew, she talks about coming to her own deep conviction in that wrestle that men and women are designed to walk side by side. And what is amazing is we’re just at the beginning, I think, of understanding what fathers and mothers offer to children in their development. But we of course would see parallels in the work of the kingdom of God, which is women will offer something men cannot offer, and men will offer something women cannot offer. And it’s together that we have this beautiful complementarity that creates a wholeness, even in the kingdom of God.
But just for a second, Mary, with parenting. So, we know women and men both experience a flood of oxytocin in nurturing life, in holding a baby. She’s going to have waves of it, but he also does. And what it elicits in her is this cooing and cuddling kind of attachment behavior, where in him, it elicits tickling and tossing. If you just see men tossing our little baby — my husband has no siblings, he’s an only child, never changed a diaper, except ours is a 35-year-old man, within like 12 hours of bringing her home, he’s doing calisthenics with LaDawn. And I’m like, “What is wrong with you? Why are you doing that?” But men have a stimulatory kind of relationship with children. It’s an activation kind of relationship. Mothers have a grounding core identity kind of relationship.
Fathers are very powerful. They’re the ones more likely to hold a baby like a football, and they give the baby the view of the outside world that they have, where she’s more likely to hold that child to her chest. And we know from lots of research that fathers shape children’s ability to relate to the outside world. They help them understand boundaries. In their play with them, they help them regulate emotions.
She is in a complementary way laying the foundation for them to understand emotion. She’s helping them understand how relationships should be, while he’s offering something unique and complementary in their way of relating to the outside world, in figuring out what the boundaries are. And mothers are more likely to correct their children. Fathers are less likely to correct their children, but when they do, the line holds. She’s more flexible in how she carries out consequences. Just one little illustration of the complementarity that’s so valuable.
And so what we see is whether it’s an academic brain development that way, emotion development, physical development, spiritual development, sexual development, they both are offering something complementary that’s important to the development of that child, without even knowing it. And so together, they create a wholeness that enables that child to have both sides, in a sense, that’s needed for development. It is an unbelievably powerful design, and I’m sure it’s the same in the kingdom of God, just as it’s the same with our heavenly parents. They together create a wholeness that is not achieved in any other way.
31:36
Mary Richards: It’s so fascinating to me to hear the research and to see, “Listen, this is true. Academically, we’ve studied this.”
But also, can you tell me more about the prophetic nature? I mean, of course we could show people studies all day. But also, isn’t there just something to believe this is from God?
31:56
Jenet Erickson: Yes. I think it’s so beautiful. I’ve taught the proclamation for years and years now, and every time I read or recite it, I marvel at what it offers. From a research standpoint, it literally in nine paragraphs gives us hundreds, if not thousands, of research studies, what they illustrate. But just as you said, it actually lays out who we are and the divine design of our heavenly parents for our growth and development.
And so, you read in there none of us will have perfect mortal families. They’re all broken, fractured because we’re mortals. But every one of us belongs to a perfect, eternal family. Every one of us has an identity grounded in divinity with the potential to become all that our parents are. That is what the proclamation gives us. And it lays out how, through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can all participate in sacred ordinances and covenants that bring us back to the presence of God and bind us in eternal relationships forever.
And so, it’s just far more than even — what I love is it’s confirmatory evidence of what I see all around me in research. But it is far more than that. It tells me exactly who I am, a daughter of parents with an eternal identity and destiny.
33:23
Mary Richards: Let me read something here from the September 2025 Liahona, again, this from President Dallin H. Oaks, the first counselor in the First Presidency. He said, “Those who do not fully understand the Father’s loving plan for His children may consider this family proclamation no more than a changeable statement of policy. In contrast, we affirm that the family proclamation, founded on irrevocable doctrine, defines the kind of family relationships where the most important part of our eternal development can occur.”
This is exactly what you were just talking about. But it’s also so interesting to mention that President Oaks did grow up — his father died when he was young, and we could say he grew up with a single mother, but he’s talked about how she always talked about his father and kept that in the conversation for him growing up.
34:15
Jenet Erickson: Mary, at the beginning of the semester, I show an image of leaders in our Church and just comment on some of the realities of their lives. You have President Oaks raised by a single mother. You have experiences of abuse. You have experiences where there was divorce. You have a host of things represented. Elder Bednar will say, “I never once had a family home evening with my whole family. I never experienced a family devotional, scripture study as a family.”
And there is no question that these are the realities of life. And part of the story of mortality, I think, is us experiencing a gap between the real and the ideal in the most personal of ways so that we can know the truth for ourselves and the power of the Redeemer in our lives, that He literally walks beside single mothers and gives them strength and power directly from Himself, and that children who experience abuse from people they should trust are literally cradled in the hands of God as they heal, and that that is real, even as the consequences of those things are also real.
I asked in class one day, we were talking about the importance of fathers, and I pulled out a student, and I didn’t know enough about their backgrounds, but I just said, “Your thoughts on the power of fathers?” And he said, “My dad has been in prison since I was 3 years old.” And I just like, “Why did I ask him?” How painful. And then he bore this powerful witness of his mother’s strength, and then also his witness that he had learned about the importance of fathers because of that experience.
And my sense is that what happens in these gaps — whether it’s my own husband, whose parents divorced when he was 6, and he’ll talk to our children about what it was like to be asked by his mom, “Who do you want to live with?” And he couldn’t answer. And he’ll help them understand why it matters that there’s a mother and father in God’s plan. And he’ll also bear witness of the power of the Atonement of Jesus Christ to strengthen and bless and help. And he has a special witness because of his experience, and a special commitment, if you will, to the truths in the proclamation in a unique way.
So, I feel like, yes, we’re going to have real things that are a gap with the ideal. That is part of mortality. We should expect it. It actually isn’t about fulfilling all of our deepest dreams. It’s not about perfect families. It is about redemption through Christ and all the different ways that we will find Him in our story, as making up for losses, as teaching us, as turning those losses into gifts in our lives. That is how great His power is.
37:19
Mary Richards: Thank you so much for sharing that. I’ll bring in one last quote here from the last member of our First Presidency, President Henry B. Eyring, also in this Liahona issue. And this is what we’ve been talking about this whole episode. He says, “The family unit is not only fundamental to society and to the Church but to our hope for eternal life. We begin to practice in the family, the smaller unit, what will spread to the Church and to the society in which we live in this world and what then will be what we practice in families bound together forever by covenants and faithfulness.”
So, as we’re looking at this 30th anniversary of the proclamation on the family, how can we, as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, advocate for the principles in the family proclamation?
38:04
Jenet Erickson: Yeah, isn’t it powerful that the last paragraph says, “We call upon ... citizens ... to promote those measures designed to ... strengthen the family as the fundamental unit of society.” And it really asks us to think about, “What does that mean to strengthen the family?” So, I can’t help but think of all the ways that we would try to promote the likelihood that every child would be raised by loving parents who are devoted to each other. We should do all we can to use policy, to use education, every format that we can to promote that.
But then it’s so beautiful to think of — I think about my husband, who didn’t see an intact marriage, grew up as an atheist then joined the Church as an adult. And for 13 years after he joined the Church, before we married, he would say, “I got to see couples live out what I hadn’t seen growing up.” And I’ve thought so many times: I wish I could take those fellow BYU law students aside and tell them, “Thank you for living a beautiful marriage so he could see it. Thank you for having children and showing him what it meant to love and the joy that comes from that.”
We cannot underestimate what it means to live that others might see and even feel in our homes the truth of those principles. And we want to do all we can to advocate for every possible way to increase the likelihood that everyone could have that mortality. But we also have to know that when we live it, even as a single mother, living the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, living the witness of the power that comes through covenants. We are changing the world in the most meaningful ways. We are standing, holding the Light of Jesus Christ to others up.
39:52
Mary Richards: And this leads to our last question on the Church News podcast, which is always: What do you know now? And so, after 30 years of the family proclamation, and after your research and all that you’ve learned, and being a wife and mother, what do you know now about the family, marriage, relationships and God’s plan?
40:18
Jenet Erickson: So beautiful, Mary. We are designed for love. We’re designed to experience love eternally. This is joy. And that is grounded in family relationships, mothers, fathers, children bound together eternally. And that we will be imperfect in it in this experience of our embodiment. But we have been given a Redeemer to walk that path and grant us the power to be changed into beings of eternal love. What I do know is God, our father, our mother, are love. God is love, and that celestial life is a life of perfect love and intimacy. And so what we are designed for is actually inherent to the plan. We yearn for it, and we will experience it. That is our destiny, to be bound in those eternal relationships forever. Family is an eternal story.
41:17
Mary Richards: Thank you for listening to the Church News podcast. I’m Church News reporter Mary Richards. I hope you learned something today about The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had your faith in the Savior increase by looking through the Church News window as a living record of the Restoration. Please subscribe, rate and review this podcast so it can be accessible to more people. And if you enjoyed the messages we shared today, please share the podcast with others. Thanks to our guests; to my producer, KellieAnn Halvorsen; and to others who make this podcast possible. Join us every week for a new episode. Find us on your favorite podcasting channels or with other news and updates about the Church on TheChurchNews.com or on the Church News app.
