Newlywed couples should immediately find their own place to live, separate and apart from either spouse's parents, even if this means your home is very modest and unpretentious—the type of home you live in is not important, be it a small house or a tent. This way your marriage can be independent of either set of in-laws. You may cherish their advice and association, but you must live your own life governed by your own decisions.
Young married couples should begin having children immediately. Do not postpone having children in order to complete an education, finish a military service period, until you are financially secure, or until a more convenient time. Yes, it will make achieving these other goals harder, and of course having children is expensive, but you will find a way. To put off having children is an act of extreme selfishness.
Countless numbers of Heavenly Father's spirit children are still in heaven, anxiously awaiting the moment a mortal woman on earth finally provides them with their opportunity to live a life on earth beginning as a baby. Before each of Heavenly Father's spirit children leaves its heavenly home, they say farewell to all those to all those in the premortal existence who loved them and had concern for their eternal well being, and expressions of confidence are given.
A woman's greatest mission in life is the sacred privilege to provide mortal bodies for some of the countless numbers of Heavenly Father's spirit children who are anxiously awaiting a chance to live a life on earth. As each of Heavenly Father's spirit children leaves heaven, it passes through the veil of forgetfulness of its previous existence, and receives a joyous welcome from its mortal family here on earth.
Some of Heavenly Father's spirit children are born into mortal bodies with a damaged brain, a missing limb, sightless eyes, or Down's syndrome. After the Fall of Adam and Eve, natural law gained far-reaching sovereignty over mortal birth, causing a wide variety of abnormalities, deformities, and deficiencies. These "pranks" of nature can leave parents baffled and full of sorrow. But however unfair they seem, they somehow suit the purposes of Heavenly Father.
There was once a Latter-day Saint married couple named David and Fran. For years they asked Heavenly Father to give them their first child. Fran finally became pregnant, and after nine months she gave birth to a son. But the baby was born with a serious heart defect, and after a three-week struggle, their newborn son died. David and Fran were brokenhearted and mourned in faith before God.
How many children should a married couple have? All that they can care for. In his efforts to deceive women, Satan suggests evil actions like the use of birth control, and encourages you to think "I should limit my number of children, for the world is overcrowded as it is." Ultimately the decision is between a couple and God. If they can stand before God in good conscience and say they have had all the children they can, then they may stop having children.
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Also from the creator of The Brick Book of Mormon:
