The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself. Steve Biddulph

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      We once went to a meeting of a youth refuge committee. The new staff person hired by the committee ran out to the car park to meet us and to say what a rough day he’d had, he hadn’t even had time to go to the toilet! During the meeting, he became increasingly defensive and agitated, and later that night was hospitalized with a psychotic episode. Eventually he rested up and got better. Steve couldn’t help thinking, that man really should have gone to the toilet!

      Everyone today talks about balancing work and family, but it’s a misconception. It isn’t just about balancing two equal sides – one is the root, the other is the flower. If you don’t feed the roots, there won’t be many flowers.

      Back in 1984 as we sat talking and preparing the first edition of this book, our baby son would often start calling to be picked up. The writing work was engrossing and important to us, but a baby can’t help being a baby! We put away the writing, and a child’s needs were met.

      So! You’ve chosen the path called family and sometimes it gets hard. You may not have known that it was a pathway to making you a complete human being. You may have thought it was just ordinary. Now you understand that you’re climbing the biggest, most glorious mountain there is, it may make both the struggles worthwhile, the view worth slowing down to enjoy, and the delights a little clearer to you.

      The chapters that come next will spell out how love works, in couple relationships, and with children. They are arranged to follow the natural life cycle of a family:

      2. Understanding early attraction

      3. Why we choose one person over any other

      4. How to understand and navigate ‘commitment’

      Then we move on to the deepening relationship questions:

      5. What kind of couple are you going to be?

      6. How to solve conflicts without compromising yourself

      7. The importance of fights and how they break through to new honesty

      8. Adding kids to the picture, and how this sets off a new level of self-exploration

      9. The sex-romance alliance and how to fuel the fires that will burn you free

      The chapter on sex and romance is deliberately placed after that about children – these two ingredients often come easily in courtship, but with a house full of kids they require deliberate cultivation!

      And finally …

      10. Advanced lessons: how every event in your life – even the disasters – can open you up to a deeper and more fulfilled life.

      THE TWO BATTLES OF MODERN LIFE

      The battle for childhood

      Today a big battle is raging, perhaps the most important struggle of our time. On one side are economic rationalists, including many in departments of Early Childhood at universities, who believe childhood can be professionalized, streamlined and mass-produced to fit the modern world. On the other side, there are those of us who think that love cannot be bought, or hurried, or squeezed into ‘quality time’, but must be hard won, eyeball to eyeball, skin to skin, between every parent and every child, over years and years of loving and learning.

      The battle is for a loving, timeless, individualized and whole childhood. The danger is that kids become lost in our materialist quest, caught in our competitive madness, homogenized into crèche-raised, insecure yuppie rugrats; the shopping centre fodder of an impersonal and conformist world where you are measured by your designer labels, and love, commitment and sacrifice are forgotten.

      The debate about putting young babies into long daycare is an obvious aspect of this, as is the battle for parents – including fathers – to be given family-friendly working hours. Corporations – not governments – run the world now, and ‘love’, ‘community’ and ‘family’ are not often in their vocabulary.

      Young parents haven’t got the time to BE parents – caught up in a roundabout of earn-and-spend. In the Third World it is even worse: workers sleep at the factory; children become prostitutes to save their families from eviction from their land.

      We have to link up our energies and give each other encouragement and ideas. Parent power is gradually rising, with the realization that we have to fight for the right to parent our children and for a society that puts people before profits, community before convenience. It’s a battle that starts at home, with the decisions we make, but that is linked to the destiny of the whole human race.

      The battle for marriage

      There’s another battle raging too: the battle to save relationships. Over 40 per cent of marriages end in divorce. Our belief from counselling hundreds of couples is that around 70 per cent of these marriage break-ups are preventable. That is, they are caused by people panicking; not having the skills, the support, or sometimes the maturity, to push on through a layer of difficulty which, if it had been faced, would have led to considerable growth. It has been found that people once separated, usually re-partner, then encounter the very same difficulties four or five years down the track – plus all the stresses left over from the first marriage: access, support, and so on. The idea that ‘If I could just find the right partner everything would be wonderful’, while certainly good to pursue as an ideal, is often flawed because it’s the same us that we take wherever we go!

      Separated people frequently admit – in the privacy of the counselling room – ‘If I knew what I know now, I would have stayed and worked on my marriage’. While there are partners whom are worth leaving: intractably violent, patently untrustworthy, abusive or addicted; the great majority of us marry people with hang-ups very similar to our own, and from whom we could learn a great deal if we were to persist. This doesn’t mean putting up with what you don’t like, but learning how to negotiate change.

      Whoever you are partnered with, it’s still the same task. To thrive in love means learning some skills – which this book will help you with. It means putting a priority on having healthy relationships. This means not getting caught up in the pressure of an insane society – the rush to earn and spend – but realizing that time is the most precious commodity in life and investing it in ways that will maximize the love in your life. This might actually mean increasing your own reflective time (sometimes the best thing you can do for your marriage or your family is take a long walk in the countryside – by yourself). And of course increasing the time you spend with each other, to give love the chance to grow.

      Time is the central issue of modern life. We no longer walk down grassy lanes to visit our friends, or work in the fields with lots of time to think, so we have to deliberately set aside soul time: time for peaceful reflection; the opportunities for deep and wandering conversations which were once an everyday part of human life. The enemy of love in the modern world is not hate, but hurry. The good news is that whenever we invest time and effort between any two human beings, parent and child, friend and friend, then love will grow.

      So these two battles – for more loving lives for children; and more committed, resilient and erotically charged relationships between men and women – are entwined. Our kids don’t need us to stay stuck in bad marriages or to leave our difficult marriages behind but to get in and sort out our problems so they can see their parents in a living, yet secure and strengthening union. We owe this stability to ourselves and to them.

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