Okay, I’ve had it! I’ve reached my limit! My tolerance for well-intentioned nonsense is kaput! Over and done with! Maxed out! Stop it! Just stop it!
I’m referring to the oft-tendered recommendation that mom and dad set aside a weekly “date night” for the purpose of taking a break from parenting and rejuvenating their marriage.
First, does anyone actually think that three to five hours a week spent in the roles of husband and wife is sufficient to maintaining a vibrant marriage? Five hours over approximately 112 hours of waking time per week is 4.46 percent.
When I ask people who are married with children to estimate the percentage of overall waking time they spend in the roles of husband or wife, the average answer is ten percent, which simply means that parenting rules in the American family. That further means that the typical American child rarely sees what a functional marriage looks like. For one thing, a functional marriage is not a five or ten percent marriage. It’s eighty percent. It’s certainly no less than sixty-six-point-seven percent.
This is a FACT, however counter-intuitive and paradoxical: Nothing puts a more solid foundation of well-being under a child’s feet than the knowledge his parents are in a committed, vibrant marriage. A child needs to see that his parents enjoy one another’s company, even that they would rather talk to one another and spend time with one another than to or with him. That defines the eighty-percenters.
The shrieking and blaspheming that you may now be hearing is coming from people who have become ensnared in the mental straitjacket of parenting correctness, the most debilitating doctrine of which is “Children need lots of attention.” No, outside infancy and toddlerhood, they do not, and children who act like they need lots of attention are nearly always children who are receiving entirely too much attention. The children in question are addicted to being center-stage in their families.
Those children — they are rare but still exist — who tolerate, even prefer, being virtually ignored under normal, day-to-day circumstances are the most secure, happiest children. They know they are loved. They know their boundaries, first and foremost of which is they are not members of the wedding. On an average hourly basis, their parents leave the children in question to their own devices, which, speaking as a former child who was left to his own devices, is an incomparable gift (so long as the devices in question are not screen-based).
Mom and dad should be part-time jobs. During the labor-intensive first two years of a child’s life, part-time is an ideal. Past that point, part-time should be the state of things. Husband and wife should be most of the time. Most-of-the-time husbands and wives take vacations without their kids — not all vacations, mind you, but at least one a year. Most-of-the-time husbands and wives put their kids to bed relatively early because they look forward to being husbands and wives without distractions.
Most-of-the-time husbands and wives don’t have one night a week set aside for being husband and wife. They are husband and wife whenever they feel like it, which is most of the time.
[Family psychologist John Rosemond: parentguru.com, johnrosemond.com. Copyright 2022, John K. Rosemond]
