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

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      We feel that the best results come not from frantic activism but from going calmly, thinking deeply and living your beliefs, as well as trying to pass them on. We have continued to work to train counsellors, especially in the healing of trauma and abuse, and to teach parenting skills, especially parenting without violence. We work in a circuit of about six countries where our books are popular and organizations exist which share our goals. We sometimes look at our lives in awe. We have been very lucky, yet we have also had enough hardship and disaster to give us a strong feeling for anyone who is doing it hard. We simply feel that it’s great to be alive, to have kids, wonderful friends and to see the sun come up another day.

      Can a book be a friend?

      Reading a book can be a bit impersonal. When you are sitting down talking with someone face to face, then it’s easy to get their measure and to feel empathy with them. We may never meet you in person but we want to convey to you the care that went into this book, and hope it comes through in the pages that follow. We hope that a feeling of connectedness grows as you read on. To feel connected, and to feel special, is every child’s – and every person’s – birthright.

      The toddler stepping out into the spring garden knows that the sun shines just for them. This book was written just for you.

      About You

      Now let’s talk about you! You’re probably right in the thick of it all. One day you woke up and you weren’t a child any more. You’ve made choices, made mistakes, made commitments, and most likely made children! You have lines on your face, and bits of you are starting to droop.

      Is this your life?

      When you’re young you have dreams that reach far into the future. But as a parent of young children, your dreams get a little more short-term. During these years, your fondest hope is probably of getting half an hour’s break and having a good lie down. A wild fantasy would be reading the newspaper right through or getting to bed with enough energy to make love to the stranger that is your partner. Before you know it, you’ve got teenagers and all the mental challenges they bring. If you’re not careful, life can be what happens to you while you’re too busy to make other plans.

      Today, as you’re reading this, your family life may be going really well. Or you may be going through a difficult patch. If it’s the latter, this is hardly surprising: family life is tough and we get very little help. We do not have a tradition in our culture for making marriage work, only for making it endure, which is not the same thing. The saying, ‘You make your bed and lie in it’ was very big in the mid-twentieth century – hardly an introduction to the craft of love. Its companion saying ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ was not much of a guide to parenting either!

      Because of the poor quality teaching that we get in human relationships, many people find family life to be a disheartening part of their lives. Researchers have found that many people feel more in control and successful at work than at home. Instead of being a harbour of comfort and security, home can be the place where you feel least successful.

      PRACTICAL STEP 1: ACKNOWLEDGE YOUR SUCCESS

      If you have been feeling overwhelmed or like a failure at family living then it is time you let yourself off the hook. Before we start to talk about how to make things better, it is vitally important that you recognize how much you are actually succeeding. If you and your kids are alive, and have most of your arms and legs, if no-one is dead or in prison (or even if they are) then you have done millions of things right.

      Without discounting the mistakes which you may have made, it’s still a fact that you have related, communicated, given and received love, and generally succeeded well beyond your conscious knowledge. One day, this will be evident to you.

      We are all pioneers, hacking our way through the wilderness of millennial family living where no generation has gone before. In the past, family relationships were often simply an appearance one kept up. People did not expect intimacy or authentic communication. Rules and clichés governed most interactions. Before World War II, marriage was often something that people endured. From the sixties onwards, everything suddenly was reversed. Marriage became a disposable item, to throw away if it didn’t work. Now as we enter the twenty-first century we may become the first generation on a wide scale with the knowledge and skills to make relationships work.

      You and your family are part of this breakthrough struggle. Everyone around you is having the same experience. Moreover, nothing you do is wasted. You don’t ‘fail’ if a marriage ends, or a kid gets into trouble. Sometimes these things have to be gone through to get where you are going. As long as you keep going, learning and adapting, you can no more fail or go backwards in life than a tree can ungrow.

      If you feel unhappy, guilty, miserable or stuck at a particular time, don’t just ignore this feeling. But do realize that you feel bad because part of you knows that something more is possible. Pay attention to yearnings, regrets and frustrations because they are all signs of the life force in you, and will actually motivate you to keep you moving on to something better, which you know is there.

      A loving life or a lonely life?

      An elderly woman we know has lived in a nursing home for many years. Her conversations centre mostly on her own discomforts, her irritations with her fellow inmates. Her life doesn’t seem to mean much beyond just waiting. Perhaps living in a nursing home has made her like this. Or perhaps she always was rather self-focused. It is sad, and a bit depressing, to visit her.

      When our kids were little they once took their most precious possession – a pet baby wombat – to show this old lady. ‘Everest’ the wombat (don’t ask!) was wrapped in a blanket, in a shopping basket, and perhaps we should have explained more loudly just what was in the package as we sat it on the old lady’s knee! At the sight of a furry creature among the folds of the blanket she shrieked and almost threw it across the room. She doesn’t much like furry things.

      Whatever adventures and passions this old lady once had are now not easy to reach. Her relatives will grieve her passing, but not a lot. They seem to be waiting for the relief of hearing that she has died. This is one kind of old age, one kind of life. Can you imagine what it might be like to grow old like this: out of touch, grouchy, self-obsessed and shut away from life?

      It doesn’t have to be like this. The bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom, tells about an old man, a college teacher, who is dying from a slowly paralysing disease. This old man was so loving and interesting and had built up so many dear friendships, that even though he could barely move or even breathe properly, his house was crowded with people, full of love, and he was ‘teaching’ to the very last – about life and how to live it. Perhaps you know someone just like this, who as they get older seem to get more full of life; not pushed to the edges. You delight in their company whenever you get the chance.

      So it seems there are two ways through life. And when you get old it will become very clear which path you have taken. If you choose to make time for love in your life, then love will come back to you when you are old and in need of it. If you focus in on yourself and your own wants and needs, then you had better save lots of money, ‘cos no-one is going to care for you much unless you pay them!

      The three big questions