Place your own oxygen mask on first

Jesse | Mar 18, 2009

Remember a few weeks ago when we talked about how a long term relationship is like a box of chocolates?  To quote from the literary giants Beavis and Butthead “huhhuh huhhuh, that was cool.”

Well, even if you find yourself a box of chocolates you think you can live with and enjoy for the rest of your life, you may still face the greatest challenge of all to the survival of that box.  Kids.  No force of nature can mess up a nice box of chocolates quite like having kids.

Stephanie Coontz, a professor of history at Evergreen State College and the author of “Marriage: A History”, wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times recently called “Till Children Do Us Part”.  She notes that more than 25 separate studies have shown that marital quality plummets after kids come into the picture.

On closer look, these studies show that not all couples’ transitions are equal.  The couples who became parents without planning it out first, or who were ambivalent about it, or who disagreed over whether to have kids at all, were much more likely to suffer.  Couples who were able to think it through beforehand and establish good communication were much more likely to maintain a happy marriage.

The other factor that Coontz points out is time.  She notes that married mothers in 2000 spend 20 percent more time with their children than mothers did in 1965 and married fathers spend more than twice as much time.

So time that, in the past, was often spent alone, or with friends, is now spent with the kids.  Couples feel that this makes them better parents, but does it?  Coontz cites the work of Ellen Galinsky who has shown that children don’t actually want to spend as much time with their parents as parents think.  What they really want is for their parents to be more relaxed when they are together.

And this certainly jives with what we have all experienced from time to time.  No child enjoys spending time with angry, sullen, bickering, resentful, sad, or withdrawn parents.  And as much as people may think they can put on a fresh face for their kids, it is almost impossible to hide your inner emotions from those little guys.  Kids are like emotional antennas, especially when it comes to their parents.  If you’re feeling upset, no amount of fake smiling can hide it from your kids.

This all consuming parenting is what leads to so many marriages breaking up with the “empty nest syndrome”.  Once the demands of child rearing are gone, couples wake up one morning to realize they have spent 18 or more years losing the connection that made them decide to marry in the first place.

Some couples feel guilty planning a vacation just for the two of them, leaving the kids behind with relatives or a babysitter.  But, in truth, this kind of thing done regularly may be the best thing couples can do for themselves AND for their children.

Someone once told me that people start dating, and when they run out of things to talk about they get married because that gives them something new to talk about.  Then, after a few years of marriage, they run out of things to talk about again so they have kids.

As I’ve argued before, marriage should never be a default option.  It should be a well thought out, seriously debated choice.  And this holds true, if anything more so, for having children.

If a couple decides to have kids, it should not be a spontaneous attempt to do something new.  If couples don’t think it through and plan for how it will go and how they will communicate and adjust, they may well end up realizing, at the end, that they don’t even like the same kinds of chocolates anymore, and maybe even having forgotten what flavors they used to share together.

The solution, of course, is to keep eating those chocolates all along so that they never get stale.  To make time for the two people to spend together and reject the idea that good parents sacrifice all of their own time for their kids.  Kids will be happier and healthier if they get to spend time with happy parents.  Better to have slightly less, but happy, time than a great quantity of time tainted by negativity.

Coontz quotes the psychologist Joshua Coleman in saying that the airline warning to put the oxygen mask on yourself before putting it on your child is true in marriage as well.  Well said.

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