At times, Ken felt as if their kids were in complete charge of everything that happened in their household. Initially, Ken felt that he and his wife had done a good job of raising their three children. They had certainly provided everything that their children needed. But in time, the kids just took over. Ken and his wife seemed almost to disappear from the household, other than to provide the household goods and services, to which their kids didn’t contribute. Ken wasn’t even sure that their kids appreciated all that he and his wife did for them. Maybe it was just a passing season, Ken figured. He just hoped that they hadn’t raised their kids wrong somehow. Ken resolved to ask his wife if she thought that their kids would turn out alright. He didn’t mind in the least doing everything for them. He just didn’t want to spoil them and in so doing ruin their lives.
Parenting
From the moment the first child arrives, and subsequent children renew the grand cycle, married couples assume their greatest responsibility of all, which, along with caring for one another, is to parent their children. Conception is brief, and maternity and delivery is a season, but parenting lasts a lifetime. The joys, challenges, duties, and opportunities change over the course of parenting, and the parent and child roles change with them, even switching. But parenting never really ends. Even when the kids are all out of the household for good, earning their own keep, and married, and the parental duties cease, one never quite stops wondering how one did as a parent, especially with every challenge one’s adult child faces and every stumble one’s adult child makes. Find an adult child repeatedly exhibiting a distinct character flaw or, worse, falling into a cycle of addiction, hospitalization, incarceration, and despair, and a parent suffers with the child. Most of us would far rather fail at a job and career, and even to make a mess of our own lives, than fail in raising children and to see them suffer as a consequence. In your marriage, give due attention to your joint parenting. Not only your children but also you, your spouse, and your marriage will suffer if you don’t.
Caring
Parenting begins with caring for one’s children. Bringing your baby home from the hospital makes that critical role instantly evident. You and your spouse are suddenly wholly and solely responsible for your child’s survival, which to the first-time parent in that moment can seem largely in question. If you and your spouse are not a well-coordinated and close-knit team before your first child, you will be after your first child arrives home with you from the hospital. No matter what the prior marital lifestyle looked like and how the two of you functioned together, in that moment everything in and around the marital household will turn on keeping that precious little infant alive. Better yet if your baby is reasonably comfortable, content, and peaceful, or you’ll both pay a steep price in the hours of wailing and in the long, sleepless nights. The first days, weeks, and months of caring for a newborn infant may bring much wonder and some bliss, but that time will also challenge, test, rearrange, and reorder a marriage like nothing else could. And while the child’s needs change dramatically over the course of the first few years, with the fantastic growth in their capability, caring for a child continues to shape and reshape the marriage at least until the child leaves a couple of decades later.
Needs
The particulars of your child’s or children’s care are yours and your spouse’s to arrange. One way or another, your child will communicate needs to you clearly. Yet your child will soon communicate not just needs but also wants and desires. And if any single parenting skill can make a big difference in how your child’s character turns out, that skill may be your ability to distinguish between your child’s needs and your child’s desires. Caring for a child requires meeting its needs, not all its desires. You and your spouse may, of course, treat your child to many things that please, even delight your child, well beyond meeting bare needs. But carefully regulate how often, the terms on which, and how lavishly you meet your child’s desires beyond its needs. If you fulfill your child’s desires too often, too lavishly, and at the wrong times reinforcing the wrong behaviors, you will spoil your child. Your child will develop a sense of entitlement and fail to develop the character and strength to strive, reach for, and grasp its own desires. Reward good behavior, not bad behavior, while keeping in mind that striving and attaining are their own reward. Supply your child’s needs. Let your child pursue and attain your child’s own desires.
Providing
Providing for children is a challenge, even if a fulfilling and satisfying challenge. Providing begins with earning the income for food, clothes, furnishings, medical and dental care, all kinds of lessons, and all the toys and entertainment, not to mention the big-ticket items including housing, transportation, and higher or private education. Yet providing also means taking the time and making the effort to get those materials, goods, and services selected, requisitioned, delivered, assembled, prepared, stored, maintained, repaired, and replaced. A marital household with children isn’t just a nursery or childcare center. It’s also an ongoing business concern with dozens of contractors and suppliers. And a mom and dad aren’t just breadwinners and babysitters. They’re also purchasing agents, logistics specialists, kitchen managers, and operations directors. A sound and stable marriage raising multiple children isn’t the picture of peace and tranquility. It is instead a smooth-functioning, humming, multi-layered, vertical and horizontal integration and assembly operation. Appreciate the complexity and nuance of providing for children in a modern American household. Simplify and streamline it where you can because the pressure is constant to bring on board ever more goods and services to grasp after the unattainable American-consumerist dream.
Development
The role that you and your spouse share as parents has only begun when providing for your child or children. Providing for your children, while protecting them from abuse and securing them from neglect, is only the most-basic parental obligation, without which you could lose your child to the state. Your greater opportunity, well beyond that basic obligation of provision, is to see to your child’s full development of your child’s character and capacity. How consistently and creatively you and your spouse manage the marital household to stimulate and sustain the physical, mental, social, and emotional development of your child or children is the truer measure of your parenting than simply meeting the basic obligation of providing. You’ve done yourself, your spouse, your marriage, and society a little by providing for your children. You will have done a whole lot for yourself, your spouse, your marriage, and society if your parenting nurtures a whole, strong, well-rounded, stable, moral, productive, and even likable youth and young adult, ready to enter society. Don’t stop or even pause at providing for your children. Don’t rest on those pale laurels. Instead, rush boldly ahead into the wonderful world of their full nurture and sound development.
Environment
A good way to think about how to stimulate and support your child’s development, well beyond providing for your child’s basic needs, is to create and arrange an environment that encourages them to explore, while offering them both challenge and efficacy. That goal doesn’t necessarily mean turning your home into a Montessori school, with a painting corner here, cutting and hammering corner there, music room in the back, fish tank on the shelf, and greenhouse in the foyer. You don’t necessarily need a petting farm out back, chickens producing eggs in the coop, and fish and frogs to catch in a wading pond. You may instead have a relatively conventional-looking household, without obvious stimulants to your child’s curiosity. But look around your house and the way that you arrange and maintain it. Does it invite your child’s engagement, or does it instead tell your child to sit down, be quiet, and don’t touch anything, while staring at an animated screen? Marital households stimulate their children in different ways. The parents may sing along, play games, tell and listen to stories, dance, wrestle, and laugh with their children. Or the parents and children may read, draw and paint pictures, build models, take apart engines, plant and tend gardens, clean the house, and fold laundry together, until the children are doing those things happily and consistently on their own and with siblings and friends. Examine your marital household to ensure that it adequately promotes your child’s curiosity, engagement, and activity, not to mention responsibility and accountability to the household’s peace and order.
Efficacy
Parents do even better when they can foster a sense of efficacy in their child or children. A marital household that invites and stimulates a child into activity may promote the child’s physical and mental development. The household, though, that further gives the child the sense of being able to consistently positively affect the environment builds the child’s character. Building a child’s character can seem so subtle and complex, or so stubbornly difficult, as to be a mystery. Does it mean rules and their enforcement? Does it mean small habits and practices that demonstrate honesty, integrity, and respect? Does it mean discipline, and if so, then when and in what form? But if you need one key for character building, consider fostering a sense of efficacy. The thing that ruins the character of children raised in a chaotic home riddled with addictions, abuse, and neglect, isn’t exposure to corruption. It’s instead that the environment fails to reward the child’s good efforts, actions, and intentions. The child has no reason to strive, practice stewardship and discipline, show curiosity, and be honest, diligent, and respectful, because the environment never rewards and instead often punishes those very things. Maintain your marital household to naturally and consistently reward every positive action, effort, intention, and attribute of your child, and you’ll raise a child of good character.
Guiding
At some point, usually in the early teen years, your child becomes so immersed in the world outside the home, including at school and among friends, that how you and your spouse arrange the household and maintain its spirit, culture, and norms becomes less of a factor in your child’s development. You become your child’s guide rather than your child’s nurturing caretaker. You can no longer arrange the child’s environment in a way that ensures your child’s full development and good character because you no longer control the child’s environment, which exists outside the marital home. Yet you remain responsible during these teen youth years for guiding your child’s development. You become a listener and observer, and a coach and guide, rather than a composer, arranger, and caretaker. To listen and observe your child doesn’t just mean to watch from a distance, like a surveillance system or spy. Rather, it means arranging regular times and activities when you and your spouse give your attention to your youth’s interests and welfare, issues and concerns. Those times may be a regular family dinner hour, drive or bike for ice cream, or periodic skiing or camping trips. Arrange and practice whatever you, your spouse, and your youth find most conducive to relaxed times of conversation. Then gently inquire, and listen. Occasionally respond, less with warnings and directives, more with brief stories of your own challenges, failures, regrets, and lessons learned. If you and your spouse consistently find effective ways and times to guide your youth, you and your spouse will have every reason to celebrate.
Launching
The last stage you and your spouse manage with your children in the household is to help them leave your household prepared for life. That step of leaving need not come down to a single day, as in here today, gone tomorrow. Many children leave in stages, perhaps first to high school summer camps, then for college or a vocational training program, while returning to your marital home on breaks. Your child may even return to the marital home after graduation from college or a training program, while seeking employment, working in transitional employment, and anticipating the next step that may be the final launch from their childhood, your marital home. You and your spouse have a very different role during this transition period than you did early in your child’s life or through your child’s teenage years. Treating your adult child like a young child or teen youth won’t work for either you or your child, although both you and your child might at times desire it. For the parent, it can be a time of maintaining a stiff upper lip. While you may want to melt in sympathy inside, your child needs you to instead remain resolute in supporting your child’s plan, intention, and obligation to leave your marital home. Except in rare cases, typically involving the child’s illness or disability, you do your child no favor by urging or allowing them to stay, either to meet their needs or preferences, or your needs or preferences. Your child needs to stand on their own two feet, to gain the strength and confidence to move forward in life.
Education
You and your spouse have enormous influence over your child’s education. During your child’s early years, your choice of schools and interest and involvement in your child’s school progress have a great deal to do with your child’s academic success. Education in those early years is unquestionably a partnership between the home and school. The more that you understand and support the school’s curriculum, the better your child is likely to do in school. Your support may take specific forms like ensuring that your child has the books, backpacks, school supplies, food, clothing, and transportation necessary to fully support school curricular, co-curricular, and extracurricular programs, while helping your child set aside time at home to complete homework. Your interest in your child’s studies, and your own trips with your child to the library, museums, zoos, nature centers, and other places where your student can learn, can greatly enhance your child’s commitment to learning. Your attitude and your spouse’s attitude toward learning will influence if not largely determine your child’s attitude toward learning. As your child advances through primary school into middle and high school, your child may face school issues that require your swift, sure, and sound attention, such as bullying, harassment, truancy, failure to academically progress, or misconduct allegations. Take those matters seriously, getting attorney help if necessary, for the substantial impact they can have on your student’s school relationships and record, and future opportunities. You don’t want your children finishing a high school education reform school or boot camp.
College
You and your spouse also have a substantial influence on your child’s college or university education. Saving for your child’s education using a tax-advantaged education savings account (ESA) or 509 plan has the twin advantage not only of relieving you, your spouse, and your child of having to arrange tuition payment or loans at the last minute, but also of setting an expectation and substantial incentive for your child to pursue higher education. College is not for every child, as they leave the home. Many children benefit from living on their own and working for a few years before attending college, to mature and to learn about their educational and vocational interests. Going back to school later may be the better option. But incentivizing higher education and relieving your child or children of at least some of its financial burden can bless your child and stimulate your child’s further development, even after leaving the marital home. Help your child investigate schools, their programs, and their costs. Unless you and your spouse are ready, willing, and able to fund your child’s entire higher education, help your child understand and compare the costs of alternative programs. Your child can get an outstanding education through community college, night school, and online or other non-traditional programs, if the cost of traditional or elite programs is burdensome or prohibitive. Helping your child investigate, select, and attend college can be an exciting and satisfying time for you and your spouse.
Vocation
You and your spouse can also help your student with investigating and preparing for a job and career. Earlier in your child’s life, you and your spouse may share with your child the joys, challenges, and benefits of the work that you each do for an income. You and your spouse may also take your child to work and help your child participate in career days at school and volunteer service related to career opportunities. You and your spouse may also find opportunities to involve your child in your work, helping you at home or even at your workplace, either as a volunteer assistant to you or for compensation from you or your employer in moderately productive roles. If you and your spouse have a home business or similar side job, enlisting your child’s help in that work may further expose your child to work habits and disciplines. Helping your child gain exposure to workplaces and develop work habits and disciplines, through internships, apprenticeships, home businesses, and similar formal or informal arrangements, can greatly boost your child’s appetite, appreciation, and skills for work, which could be another gift with which you bless your child.
Failure
Some children struggle, not just with the ordinary challenges of childhood and youth but instead mightily, with extraordinary challenges and terrifying failures. Pray that your child doesn’t reach the point, say, of school expulsion, enrollment in an alternative disciplinary program, or placement in a juvenile detention center. Incarceration of an adult child, their severe drug or alcohol addictions with associated long-term psychiatric hospitalizations, and their joblessness and homelessness can devastate not just them but also you and your spouse within your marriage. You and your spouse may discern things you did or didn’t do that you believe contributed to your child’s failures. Every parent has doubts about the way that they raised their child or children, no matter how well they turn out. Most parents can identify clear regrets, again no matter how delightful and stable the adult child. Learn from your errors and omissions even if it’s too late to help your own child. Use what you learn to help other parents who still have time to reform their parenting practices to better raise their child. Yet the mysterious thing is that children who had awful parenting can still turn out fine, while children who had outstanding parenting can still do terribly. Outstanding parents even have one child who becomes an adult star and one child who becomes an adult failure. So don’t destroy yourself or your marriage over a child’s struggles, no matter how severe. Give the devil his due, but don’t give him your marriage. And keep in mind that children who fail spectacularly often go on to spectacular success. Stand by your failing child with every bit of love and compassion you can muster, but not in ways that remove from your child the due lesson of consequences. They’ll soon learn, one way or another. And you’ll all be better for it. We all learn and grow more from failures than successes.
Reflection
What have been, or do you expect to be, your marriage’s greatest parenting challenges? How can you prepare for the next parenting challenge you anticipate? How well did you and your spouse manage together the care of your newborn infant? How did your marriage change or do you expect it to change with your newborn or as your child grows? Not that you had a choice, but how did you and your spouse feel about the changes as your child grew? Could you modify some of your parenting practices to ensure that you and your spouse are doing well in your marital relationship? How well do you think you and your spouse do in fostering your child’s full development? Could you change, or do you need to change, some things in your marital household to help your child grow, develop good character, and mature? If you have a teenage child, do you still know your child’s thoughts, issues, and fears reasonably well? Are you able to coach and guide your teenage child effectively? Do you need to change your attitude or approach to improve your ability to positively influence your teen? Are you and your spouse participating adequately and appropriately in your primary or secondary school child’s education? Are you and your spouse saving for your child’s higher education? If so, are your savings where they should be to reach your goal coincident with your child’s college admission? How can you help your child learn about the workplace and develop work habits and disciplines?
Key Points
Parenting is a marriage’s greatest duty and greatest challenge.
Caring for a newborn child requires rearranging marital routines.
Providing for a child’s needs requires dedicated work and management.
Focus on your child’s full development beyond providing basic needs.
Maintain the marital household to stimulate your child’s engagement.
Help your child see that your child can positively affect the household.
Listen, observe, and guide and coach your child through teenage years.
Remain dedicated to your adult child’s launch from your marital home.
Help your child investigate higher education options and costs.
Save for your child’s higher education with tax-advantaged plans.
Help your child learn vocational practices and disciplines.
Don’t let your child’s failures destroy your marriage; stay the course.