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Family Matters
By Jeff Kemp
A marriage-centered family benefits parents, kids
In his book “Take Back Your Marriage,” marriage and family expert Bill Doherty tells the story of Dave and Deirdre, a loving couple with a typical middle-class family.
Dave and Deirdre are completely devoted to caring for their children and are highly involved parents. But as their kids have gotten older and busier, Dave and Deirdre have slowly lost touch with each other. Most of their time is spent catering to the needs and activities of the kids, and when they do find time for one-on-one conversation it usually centers on the children or household logistics.
Family time that is focused on the interaction between parents and their children is extremely important to the proper development of kids. But time spent between spouses is also a significant factor in the health of a family. After all, as the marriage goes, so goes the family.
Unfortunately, this needed balance between parent-child interaction and husband-wife interaction is missing in many of today’s families. According to Families Northwest’s 2001 Family Time Report, only 33 percent of married parents in Washington State said they intentionally try to spend as much or more time with their spouse as they do with their children.
The report also found that married parents want to spend significant time with their spouse. When asked if “having more time to spend with your spouse” would improve their overall quality of life, 84 percent indicated it would.
Just as time is one of the keys to a healthy parent-child relationship, it also is vital to the long-term health of a marriage. When spouses are unable to connect on a regular basis and grow in their intimacy with one another it can have serious repercussions for the entire family.
Research has shown that most divorced couples contemplating divorce don’t choose to end their marriage due to issues such as domestic violence, emotional abuse, chronic infidelity, drug abuse or abandonment.
In a 1997 study on the relationship between the effects of divorce on children and pre-existing marital conflict, researchers Paul Amato of the University of Nebraska and Allan Booth of Penn State University found that “70 percent of divorces represent the termination of low-conflict marriages.”
The vast majority of couples contemplating divorce have simply drifted apart, forgotten how to communicate with one another or have simply let other things consume the majority of their time, attention and energy. Sometimes those “other things” are the demands of parenthood.
Doherty says it’s easy to find reasons why your kids’ needs are front and center, but if you neglect your spouse in the process of parenting you won’t be doing your kids any favors.
If you answer three or more of the statements below from “Take Back Your Marriage” as “true” about you and your marriage, you’re giving away your married life to your kids and should work to set up boundaries to get back a life with your mate.
- Five nights out of seven, your preadolescent kids go to bed whenever they want, and it’s usually well after 9:00 P.M.
- When you’ve finally found a moment with your spouse, even if it is in the car on the way to the soccer match, your kids invariably ask you to turn up the music, give them a juice box or demand you hear about the latest video game, and you find it easier to listen than to ask them to wait until you’re done talking with your spouse.
- You haven’t had a night out alone together in a month – and you can’t even remember the last one before that.
- The lock on the bedroom door is growing rusty with disuse.
- Your down time as a couple is always family time, for example, spent watching a Disney video with the kids instead of listening to jazz on the deck while the kids watch the movie indoors.
- When the choice at the moment is between talking to your spouse about his or her day or playing ball with your kids, you almost always choose the kids.
- When you’ve finally finished driving the kids to violin lessons and swim practice and have completed the science project you just found out was due tomorrow and your spouse wants to sit down and relax with you, you just can’t resist folding Johnny’s laundry or working on building Tanya’s dollhouse “while we talk.”
Now that we’ve identified some potential signs of stunted growth and lost intimacy in a marriage, we can begin to focus on what to do about it. Next week I’ll discuss some “connection rituals” you and your spouse can practice on a daily basis that will restore intimacy and help you “take back your marriage.”
Jeff Kemp is a husband and the father of four boys. He also serves as President of Families Northwest, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the Northwest the world's premier place for marriage, family life and children.
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