Do you want to know how to strengthen your marriage when you're raising kids?
I'm Nicholeen Peck, and I am the mother of four previous foster parent of many and
I teach parenting, good communication and how to build good strong family bonds all over the
world through the lens of the principal self government. In this video, we're going to be
talking about your marriage, and what you can do during those crazy childbearing years.
In this video, we're gonna be talking about what happens to your marriage during those crazy child
raising years, and practical steps that you can take to make sure that your marriage stays
on track while you're doing that every important task of raising the children too. When you first get
married, everything in the relationship is just all about the husband and wife, that couple, that
spouse and everything is so fun and playful and childlike and it's just like, everything's free,
very liberating, right? And then you want a child so much, and that child comes in,
and suddenly you feel like shackled. Like, wait, what has happened? Suddenly, we don't have as much
freedom, as we once had, suddenly, now, we're not even free to sleep all the way through the night.
And as they grow, we think it's gonna get better, it's gonna get better. But every parent can tell
you that as they grow, then there's just new concerns, there's new issues. Now you're staying
up later, instead of waking up all through the night. Now you're running to different things,
and you don't have time to cuddle with your spouse. So what do you do because what can happen
is that there can be a distance that develops in the husband and wife relationship, and you
have to be very careful that that distance does not become too wide and that the relationship
with the children does not take the place of the relationship with husband and wife. So at the end
of the day, I can tell you with full knowledge that once the children are all grown and gone,
which is the goal, right, that they will launch off on their own. That's what we want for our children,
to be independent, autonomous adults, right, then what's left? You and your spouse. And I'm at that
stage right now I'm an empty nester. And I see the beauty in my relationship with my husband.
And I thought, boy, I am sure glad that we made it through some of those bumpy patches that happened
when life is crazy, and you need more money and more money because the children are coming and
they have needs, and the house has to grow and all those things. So we've got to work so hard
and everything else. But also through those times where we felt like we were just stretched thin on
time, energy dealing with childhood problems, all those things, somehow we still came out, okay and
it's because we did some key things as a husband and wife to make sure that we were constantly
nurturing our relationship and that's what I'd like to talk about with you today. Another thing
that can happen to us in our husband and wife relationship that we need to be very careful
about is we can actually lose our identity. So we do have a certain identity in that husband and
wife relationship, which is very different than our identity with our parent child relationship.
So we have to make sure that we are constantly focusing on both of those relationships. When you
are a parent, even though it takes a lot of your time, you do have to make sure that you are doing
something for that other identity. So let's talk a little bit about what it means to have identity or
role in a relationship. So I actually have a whole book on roles and in this book, Roles:
The Secret to Family, Business and Social Success. There's actually a couple and their family and
because it's a story and you learn through the story and in this book, the husband and wife
are starting to see themselves as against each other. This means that they've lost their roles
in the husband and wife relationship because when husband and wife are seeing themselves as
counter to each other or warring with each other then they are not being what they are supposed to
be for each other in their role or identity in that husband and wife relationship. As a help me,
you should be seeing yourself as there for the other person. You are someone who is the other
half of that other person, which means that you are always focusing on them, even though there are
other concerns that are around you all the time. I know sometimes as a mother, especially if you're
a mother who stays at home with your children throughout the day, which I know I did for a long
time while I was running businesses and everything at the same time. I felt like there were so many
priorities and tasks that were weighing on me and that was all I could see was that and I forgot
that I still had a duty to that other role in my life, which was to look out for my husband and I
other people are thinking, Well, come on, does the lady have to look out for everything? No,
no, she doesn't. But if I don't look out for that relationship, if I don't think how can I serve him
today? How can I help him today, then what I'm going to do is I'm going to become myopic about
just my thing and what I'm focusing on, and when I do that, I lose the identity of wife,
I stopped being unified and one with him, which actually becomes then a really big problem. And
the same thing could happen for him, whether he's at home, or whether he's at the office, if he is
just focusing in on his tasks, his projects, and he only thinks about what he wants to do next,
oh, now I'm gonna go play golf, now I'm gonna go, you know, whatever it is, I'm going to do or Okay,
I'll do those things for the kids. But he's not thinking about how to serve the other person,
then suddenly, he loses his husband identity as well. We need to make sure that we're constantly
protecting our roles and our identities by making sure that we're looking out for each other and
being helped meets for each other as well. All right, I'd like to share with you some practical
steps that you can do to improve your husband and wife relationship. But before I do, click on the
subscribe button now. This channel has a ton of great content that is filled with good principles
of communication that won't just help you and your children, which is going to benefit your
marriage, but it will also directly help your marriage. So click on the subscribe now. First,
make sure that you have a regular time to play together because that's what you did before the
children were there. So you need to have a date night. I know people talk about that a lot. I'm
not going to spend a ton of time there, because that's common advice that's given to improve a
husband and wife relationship. But it really can't be overstated. You've got to have time to play and
to talk where it's just you. My husband, and I decided years ago that we would have one night a
week that was dedicated to our date night. So we always had Saturday night as date night for us
and this was very therapeutic. We didn't just do that though. We also made sure that we had
retreats from time to time, even if we just took the children to grandma and grandpa's house and
then we had a night or maybe to just ourselves, those days and those nights to talk about those
things that we wanted to for our family to work on projects that maybe we weren't having the time
to get to or sometimes we even stayed in a hotel room, in a hotel that was literally just down the
street from our house. Because we thought well, we can't be very far because the children are
small if they need something we need to be able to run over. But we still need to have a retreat
and obviously we had somebody come and stay with the children. But you know, just in case there's
an emergency. So you don't even have to go far. Obviously, we had some other trips and stuff that
were further away sometimes too. But making sure that you set that time aside is a really important
thing. It shows that you value the relationship and that it has a priority in your heart. Second,
make sure that you deliberately plan for how you will discuss family problems. This
is important because sometimes those little family problems or differing of opinions can
get in the way can start making you feel like you're your own island and not unified together
as one. So what we did was we decided to have regular couples meetings. In our family, we have
three different meetings that are planned, always happen Sunday afternoons, we have couples meeting,
which I'm going to talk about in just a minute. Then we have family meetings, this is where the
whole family meets together and then we have individual mentor meetings. So both parents
meet with the child individually, every single week. These meetings help us communicate well as
a family and solve problems as a family. But the foundational meeting, the one that you don't ever
want to miss is this couples meeting. So these are journals where we keep all of our meeting notes,
let's talk about the couples meeting, and how to make an effective couples meeting.
An effective couples meeting is no longer than 30 minutes, because if you make them too long,
one person will just continue to vent and vent and vent and the other person really doesn't
look forward to the next couples meeting. Now you know your personalities, you know who is the
person who's going to go on and on, get sidetracked or whatever. So keep them to a time limit.
We had 30 minutes, we also had a place that we would have and we had him in our bedroom. But
no one was allowed to sit on the bed. So we had other places that we would sit to make sure that
nobody fell asleep during the couples meeting which was also important. Now both husband and
wife need to be there, of course, some people start their couples meetings with a prayer, others don't,
we often did that because we're religious people and we'd like to bring God into the mix as well.
Then we would talk about the scheduling. So what's going on in the week? What projects do
we need to be working on? Hey, what's coming up with the children, those kinds of things, those
things that seem to take so much time, get those out of the way, and never take longer than like,
probably 10 or 15 minutes of your 30 minutes on that scheduling. Then we move to family business,
things that we are concerned about for the family, where do we want to go on our family vacation this
year, or maybe you know what type of humanitarian projects we want to do at Christmas time,
things that we do as a family, maybe we're going to go through some options for car buying during
this couples meeting. After we talk about family business, then we talk about the children and what
we can do to help the children. So we take each child one by one, and we discuss them.
I share with Dad things that he may not know that are going on in the lives of the children so that
he can better help them when we have our meetings after the couples meeting. He also talks to me
about areas of focus that he thinks that he sees, and we come up with plans for how to help our
family and then finally, we spend the last little bit of time talking about our couple relationship.
Now, obviously, if the couple relationship needs the most help, spend the majority of your time
there. But usually the types of things that we talk about in our couple relationship is how are
we communicating? Can we do any better? Do we have any needs that we can tell to each other
so that we can make sure that we're looking out for each other? Can we make plans for our
upcoming date that we're going to be having or the retreat that we have planned for ourselves?
These are things for our couple relationships that are important that we discussed together
so that we make deliberate plans to strengthen our couple relationship. Now another thing that
we will discuss in our couple relationship is how we will correct each other if one person
is starting to do something that another person thinks might not be a good idea. So this brings
me to the thing that divides couples the most and that is how the child rearing is happening.
So many people are not on the same page in their parenting and this creates contention in their
husband and wife relationship. If they can get on the same page in their parenting, that makes
all the difference. Now I know for some people that's like pie in the sky, they're like, Okay,
I'm turning this off right now because he or she is never going to be on the same page with
me. Well, you might be surprised, my husband and I did not used to be on the same page and now we
are totally on the same page. He is like the like the missionary of the teaching self government
parenting model, which is what I teach. So there are ways to get on the same page. In fact, I have
a book that really helps get on the same page. Actually, I want to make a correction, I have two
books. So this book, Popular Parenting Methods, is probably the number one book that people use to
get on the same page as husband and wife. It talks about the different types of parenting, the results
that you find and the stumbling blocks. The things that you might not be noticing that you're dealing
with because of your form of parenting, and helps get you on the right track and leads you into this
book, Parenting A House United. So parenting house united gives you all of the tools and principles
that you need to correct problems, not only with the children, but in your husband and
wife relationship. It teaches you how to do all of the meetings that I just talked about, and how to
solve problems in a calm and effective way while teaching the children how to govern themselves,
and you governing yourself too. If you've enjoyed this video, I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy my next
video which is actually a full class dedicated to helping you overcome some of those traps in
your communications and your relationships that you might not recognize you're falling into.
The video is called the expectation trap versus the cycle for success. Click on the link to that
video now. I'll see you there.