Since he left NFL football 16 years ago, Redmond resident and Stronger Families president Jeff Kemp’s passion has been to help couples improve their marriages and provide stability for their children.
“I was raised by a really, cool, encouraging family,” said Kemp, whose father Jack was also a professional athlete and congressman. “My parents taught me that you live your life to make it better for others. Football was a pretty unique platform to reach people and I said, ‘What can I do with that platform?’ So many problems are with our kids, for such a rich country.”
He cited issues such as abuse/neglect, drug use and sexually-transmitted diseases.
“All the agencies in the world can’t step in,” if family support and involvement aren’t there, he said.
Kemp described Stronger Families’ fall event, at 7 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 7, as “a date-night with purpose” featuring nationally prominent author and marriage therapist Michele Weiner-Davis. The “Keeping Love Alive” event is at Crossroads Bible Church, 15815 SE 37th St. in Bellevue. Cost is $40 per couple or $20 per person.
Weiner-Davis, who’s been featured on “Oprah,” “The Today Show” and “20/20,” is nicknamed “The Divorce Buster.” Kemp said “her forte is not to dig into people’s (marital) problems but to look at what does work.”
When people undergo marriage counseling — and spend a month or two rehashing painful incidents from their family of origin and mistakes they’ve made in their own relationships — emotions can become very raw, leading to “a lack of hope, a lack of patience for time to change things,” said Kemp.
A large portion of what Stronger Families does, is to offer “a hub of best practices, preventative work,” he noted. When the organization began, about 30 percent of people had marriage preparation through churches or other counseling, he said. “It’s more like 40 percent now.”
He said people who prepare in small groups, do enrichment activities and have regular date nights are 50 percent less likely to divorce.
“You also reach a lot of people at the point of crisis,” Kemp said, meaning people whose marriages are already in trouble.
Right now, job loss and military deployment are among key stressors affecting many couples in our region and nationwide. And it doesn’t help when reality TV shows depict people choosing a husband or wife like they would go shopping for a new car or appliance.
“Relationships aren’t consumption items,” Kemp stated. “Young people really want marriage but we wait longer. Cohabitation rates are higher out of fear of divorce and because of societal acceptance of such relationships. And marriage ideals are very romanticized. Divorce used to be 15 to 20 years down the road, after the kids were out of the house. Then it was more around the seven-year mark. Now, two years into a marriage, some people want out. People are faster to make a judgment call like, ‘This hasn’t lived up to what I thought it would be.'”
Kemp reiterated, “When I left football, I was determined to help kids under an umbrella of family strengthening. The real core solution is the essential relationships of family and marriage … making a strong marriage better, or if it’s medium, to work at it and lower divorce rates.”
In a press release from Stronger Families, Weiner-Davis commented, “Divorce Busting is a program that provides people with skills they need to make their marriages work and keep their families together … even if one spouse has a foot out the door.”
She added, “After several decades of rampant divorce and disposable marriages, we have finally learned that divorce often causes more problems than it solves. Additionally, I believe that most divorces are truly unnecessary because more marital problems are solvable. Even long-standing, deeply entrenched problems can be resolved with the right tools.”
To learn more about Stronger Families and its Nov. 7 event with “Divorce Buster” Michele Weiner-Davis, visit www.StrongerFamilies.org or call (425) 679-5671.
