The New Eve - Lewis Robert [43]
Finally, get involved together in a local church. Build a Christian community around you. Research shows that couples who attend church together on a regular basis are between 35 and 50 percent less likely than all other Americans, including infrequent churchgoers, to get a divorce.5
Married with Preschoolers
I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “My children saved me from toxic self-absorption.” There's a lot of truth in that. If ever there was a season of life that is not about you, this is it. Your little ones require major-league attention. They are desperate for face time with you. Lots of it.
I once read a story about a young third-grader named Timmy who was having trouble at school. Timmy's mother was called in to discuss his poor performance. She heard about his reading problems and his struggles with math. Then the teacher asked, “Why does Timmy always say, ‘Love is slow?’” Timmy's mother suddenly began to sob. She knew. She then explained about her demanding job and the long hours she had to give to it. To get to work on time in the morning, she had to constantly push Timmy along. Then at night after a long day, she had to rush back home to cook dinner, clean up, and get to bed. The whole time she was pressing Timmy to finish his homework, pick up his toys, take a bath, and so on. “I find myself constantly saying to him, ‘Timmy, you are so slow!’”
For any child, love is slow. You simply cannot properly nurture the next generation without large amounts of time and focused attention. That's particularly true for children five years of age and younger. But for whatever reasons, today it's very hard for many young mothers to hear that.
In a recent landmark study conducted by Dartmouth Medical School, researchers discovered that the way a child's brain wires itself, neurologically speaking, is determined after birth by the care and attention he or she receives. Love shapes a child's brain! Love helps a child's brain connect itself together in a healthy way. The Dartmouth study also found that if a child is neglected and the love he or she needs falls short, these same neurological connectors actually mis-connect, creating emotional and intellectual deficits in the brain that can last a lifetime.6
New sociological data backs up these findings. It shows that as the economy and standard of living in America has skyrocketed in the past thirty years, so has the rate of mental disorders and emotional problems among children.7 Busy, career-minded parents, absent emotionally or physically, breed troubled kids. It's an epidemic money doesn't fix. That's the short of it. Nothing is more indispensable to a young child than large amounts of time and attention from a loving mother and father. Nothing.
Your spouse needs you too in this season of life. Frankly, a lot of the things that were fun when you first married—spontaneity, freedom, and extra money—are simply gone now, banished by a teetering pile of diapers, sleepless nights, calls for “Watch me,” and growing pains. This is a major marriage adjustment time.
That being said, you must keep time for your spouse. This will not be easy. Early-childhood parenting is exhausting, but you cannot allow it to eclipse your marriage. The best survival remedy I know is the one Sherard and I practiced for years in this season of our lives: we took quarterly getaways together. These can do what the frenzy of everyday life at this stage cannot do: provide you with some much-needed downtime when you can rest and focus on one another. You may not have a lot of money for this, but a special overnighter (or more) once every three months will serve as an oasis of refreshment for you and your husband to talk, reflect, plan, play,