By Jenny Runkel

This September will mark the first year in almost a decade that I will not be putting up bulletin boards and making new seating charts. I am in the midst of changing careers, from teaching others to write to trying the craft out on my own. I must admit, I am having quite a bit of trouble with not having my own classroom anymore. I always loved rolling the freshly sharpened pencils, with their earthy, clean smell, between my fingers and imagining what lay ahead. There was something magical to me about starting over each year with a new group of students, a new set of goals, a new set of chances.

So, the other day, in order to assuage my sinking spirits, I went into Office Depot - the respite for type-A souls in need of recharging. It is such a safe place; everything is so bright and full of promise. Even the highlighters look happy. The unopened packs of loose leaf paper just waiting to be used and the multicolored three ring binders in varying degrees of thickness made me wonder why I left teaching this year. I even found myself wistfully touching a new set of fine point, soft-gliding red pens and I swear that I could hear them whisper, "Buy me! I'll make you feel competent and powerful."

Truth be told, I am extremely excited about my new venture with ScreamFree, but I am also a bit mournful over what I will be leaving. I will miss the smell of a clean classroom and the promise that those empty desks hold. I will miss watching a child's face as they finally grasp a difficult concept. I will miss the teacher treats that our PTO used to leave sporadically in the teacher's lounge. But there is one thing that I will decidedly not miss, in any way:

When we first get married, we make all sorts of time for each other. We spend long nights over lingering dinners and we vacation to quaint little spots, just the two of us. Those are relationship building activities that suddenly are hard to come by when all of the sudden children enter the mix. If you find yourself too tired to even think about finding time for your spouse, read on as Hal talks to one reader in this same predicament.

Dear Hal, In your seminars, you talk about how one of the best things we can give our kids is a strong and healthy marriage. As much as I agree, my husband and I are so busy now that we have kids that we find it hard to even breathe, much less connect with each other. I thought things would get less hectic as our kids got older, but it is only getting worse. How can we, as parents, better maintain our strong relationship when our kids take so much of our time?

When my wife Jenny and I started having kids, we were still relatively young. I was 25 and Jenny was 24 when our daughter Hannah was born. I was not yet a therapist, nor even in training to be one. And ScreamFree would not enter our vocabulary for another six or seven years. But there was one decision we made back then that was wise beyond our years, remarkably ScreamFree in its philosophy, and has proven to be one of the strongest components of our successful marriage and family life.

Simply put, we set a bedtime for our kids, a bedtime early enough to give us at least two to three hours every night just to ourselves.

We did not set out to make some life-changing, principle-defining precedent. It was more like two baby care-exhausted, adult conversation-starved, downtime- craving parents deciding they just had to do something or they would simply go out of their minds. So we just said enough is enough. Bedtime happened between 8 and 8:30 PM, period. It was just an ironclad commitment for which everyone and everything else would have to accommodate.

So we did some research and employed an incredible method to teach our daughter to sleep through the night on her own, which took all of two nights. This method worked so well, I believe, because it was fueled first and foremost by our commitment, not by us "trying to do what's best for our daughter." It's not that we didn't want what's best for our daughter, it's just that we prioritized that healthily, happily married parents are always what's best for our daughter.

And usually, every decision we make to strengthen our marriage ends up being exactly what's best. Take the bedtime, for instance. Turns out our kids, even today, 10 years later, function so much better with a regular bedtime. Now our kids are 10 and 8, and that bedtime is between 8:30 and 9 PM. And just like our daughter's cries that first night, they still occasionally protest. But those are just tests to our commitment level. And we're still as committed as ever to have those few hours to ourselves every night we're together.

Now to some, reading my words above comes across as uncaring, or negligent parenting. "Of course you need to strengthen your marriage," they will protest, "but kids have to come first." But here's the truth-the highest rate of divorce, by far, occurs during the first five years of a marriage, particularly when there are children born during that time.

Parenting is just hard on a marriage, it's that simple. Especially during those early years when couples usually don't have any experience, any money, or any time. With all of the incessant demands of childcare, couple time is usually the first casualty.

But it doesn't have to be. Once you gain a vision for couple time as the key ingredient to overall family stability and sanity, then you'll do whatever it takes to make it happen. Your kids won't like that commitment from you, but deep down, they'll love you for it.

Stay Cool,
Hal

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