Tips for Maintaining Your Marriage While Raising Your Kids
A couple of weeks ago my wife, Joy, and I dropped our son off at the dorm for his freshman year of college.
Yikes!
It seems like yesterday we were walking him to the bus stop so he could ride to kindergarten with his friends from the neighborhood. We’ve been through some trials and tribulations raising our kids, but I’m really glad that Joy and I could do it together.
I want to share a few tips that helped us stay focused on maintaining our marriage while rearing children:
1. A good friend shared this mantra to repeat to ourselves when frustrated by the kids: “It’s age appropriate behavior.”
2. We both were adamant that they were given a good faith grounding. My experiences were wide and varied growing up attending multiple churches and faiths. Joy was raised as a child of medical missionaries. The church provided soul food for our children and our marriage.
3. Read anything and everything. Establishing good reading skills will help them throughout life.
4. Guidelines for behavior were posted everywhere in the house along with consequences and rewards. When the kids were younger we would ask them what they thought the appropriate consequences should be and found that they were much harder on themselves.
5. We found the book, 1-2-3 Magic, to be helpful during the grammar school years. We rarely reached three while counting the kids. As they got older, they figured out the game and we had to adjust.
6. The kids were given household responsibilities early and started packing their own lunches and doing their own laundry while still in grammar school.
7. We found friends and neighbors we could trade with to watch the kids so we could maintain somewhat regular date nights. We also made sure the kids understood the meaning of privacy and made sure the lock worked on our bedroom door.
8. We don’t always agree on the best way to discipline our children, and that’s okay. We always talk to each other about our approach, preferably before we talk to the kids.
Next year, we will be dropping our daughter off at her freshman college dorm and adjusting to being empty nesters.
I’m really glad that we have spent time while raising the kids to make sure we still have a great marriage. Hopefully these tips will help you while raising your kids to have great marriages too.
