This week of Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember raising other people’s children requires us to prioritize our marriage after self-stewardship but ahead of our children. As parents, we know that we need to put our children’s needs ahead of our own. We should not put them ahead of our marriages.
Caveat: Only Safe Relationships are Worth Protecting
An important condition, of course, is that I am talking about a healthy and safe marriage. People in social services fields hear far too many stories of people who stayed with abusive spouses and left their children at risk. Safety is not optional. If any of your relationships leaves anyone in your life physically or emotionally unsafe, then you need to find a way to leave it. No relationship, including marriage, is worth any compromise of safety.
In the vast majority of cases, though, we are talking about physically and emotionally safe relationships grappling with the common and unavoidable problems of trying to blend people with different histories into a solid family. Keeping that marriage strong is the only hope for a healthy and functioning family.
Two Reasons A Happy Marriage Is Foundational for Our Kids
It is important for us to remember that we are not shortchanging our children by prioritizing our marriages. We actually are doing exactly what we need to do to meet our children’s needs.
1. A Strong Marriage Gives Our Kids An Important Anchor. Long-standing research is clear that children function best when their parents have a loving and stable marriage. Our relationship is one of the anchors of our children’s lives — if our marriage is solid, then that anchor is solid. If not, then they have that much less structure in already chaotic lives.
Now, our kids may not want us to have a strong marriage. Our children can reject us out of loyalty to a biological parent, unresolved grief, or simple personality conflicts. They may test our commitment to our marriage just as they will test our commitment to them. Sometimes our kids will do it deliberately by demanding that we put them first. Other times, they will do it instinctively by creating crises that make them the temporary center of attention.
Nevertheless, like most structure in their lives, children need more than they want. They need to know that the family has a strong and stable foundation. A strong marriage relationship that presents a united front is an important way to make our kids’ lives better.
2. A Strong Marriage Shows Our Kids How It’s Done. Perhaps the most important way that our kids will benefit if we prioritize our marriages is that they need to see how loving adults work through a crisis and keep a marriage together. They already have seen far too many adult relationships fall apart. If we cannot show them what a healthy romantic relationship looks like from the inside, they may never see one. It is our job to model for them how to forge strong, stable, and healthy relationships. By watching us, they can learn practical ways to build emotional connection and keep marriages strong even in the middle of chaos. More important, they will learn that great marriages are not just the stuff of fairy tales.
Conclusion
Like core values and self-stewardship, prioritizing our marriage is an essential foundation for parenting our children. That principle goes against our instincts, and certainly against our current child-centered culture. But it’s really the best way to give our children the secure foundation they need for their lives and show them how to work through problems to keep adult relationships strong. We may be the only people in their lives who can do that for them, and we need to make that lesson a high priority.
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Learn more about foster and step-parenting in my online courses at YSOAcademy.com.
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