Honey, Our Marriage is Too Precious to do Nothing!

Now we have come to a very sensitive and pertinent part of the relationship. You might call this a special extension. However, I like to call it the children. Brace yourself because contrary to popular belief children do not come with an owner's manual. You have to wing it on your own, you know, the trial and error thing. Fortunately this is to our advantage. You're probably saying to yourself by now, has she gone completely nuts? Nevertheless, Calm down and I'll explain. I know this must be a very abrupt rude awakening. So just take a couple of deep breaths and you'll be fine. Fortunately, anyone that has been around children for any length of time knows that they learn by example and modeling. In a nutshell a better term for this is consistency. Children do exactly what they see in spite of what they are told. If the rules are changed midstream then you upset the whole program and they become very confused and, in fact, have to be reprogrammed . Today its right and tomorrow its wrong type of situations arise. Honestly I don't blame them; I would be confused as well. If you think they are confused now, add marital problems on top of that and you guessed it. You've got chaos like you would not believe. This is exactly where it starts to filter down to the kids. Right away they no longer have an example to follow and they are placed in an environment of constant arguing and disarray. Obviously, the only way to solve the problem is to go back to what started it in the first place. Trust me, there is hope after chaos .

Well you've heard the old saying: the husband has a bad day at the office, comes home and yells at the wife, kicks the dog and tunes the kids out as he consumes his ice cold drink in front of the television. Indeed, don't forget to bring him his slippers and the remote control or life just simply cannot go on. Well, I got an even better one for you. Try this one on for size. The husband and wife argues, all lines of communication are then extinguished, the kids come in and say "Hi, I'm home" only to hear no one really cares, dinner is a silent one, everyone starts to walk on eggshells and then there's the note from your child's teaching that was conveniently forgotten telling you his or her behavior is unacceptable. But how can this be true of my child, you ask yourself as you reread the letter in disbelief. Right away your spouse chimes in and the lines of communication are conveniently reopened once again because the focus is on someone other than yourselves. There is a definite problem here but this time it concerns the children. You say to yourself, "my child has never gotten into trouble and has been a perfect angel all of his life". This may be true but, as mentioned earlier, children learn by example and consistency. The point here is that when we have disagreements we need to look at the entire picture. So many people are effected by our actions. There is no way this child would have had a behavioral problem if he or she had not been shown how to misbehave through our modeling. He or she only did what they were taught to do. As a result, are the children affected? You better believe they are. Now that we know what started the problem I think we need to solve it. Again, fear not, help is on the way. Lucky for us there are several avenues that we can approach to accomplish our task. Let's take a look.