The Surprising Ways that Marriage Changes Once You Have Children
Maybe you've caught yourself wondering what happens to your marriage after the kids you and your spouse keep dreaming about actually arrive. Will there still be room for lovemaking that nobody planned? Can you still toss a few shirts in a bag and disappear for a weekend on a whim? Will your childless friends, the ones who seem effortlessly cool, still fit into your orbit? Will the two of you even have time for each other anymore? If any of that has run through your head, welcome to a very large club. Newlyweds ask these questions. So do couples who have been together for years. And the plain answer is yes, your life shifts once children show up, but a shift is not the same as a loss. Plenty of it may turn out richer than you pictured. The romance survives. So do the nights out with friends. You'll just be adding a babysitter to the equation. What follows are the changes, the sweet ones and the ones nobody warns you about.
Start with quality time, because the phrase itself quietly changes meaning. Before kids, it points at the two of you. After kids, it widens into the whole household. A free afternoon stops being about what the couple wants to do and becomes what the family can do together. The old repertoire shrinks accordingly. Wandering around undressed on a Saturday, spending the entire day in bed, feeding each other strawberries under the sheets: none of that works with small people appearing around every corner.
The couple time doesn't vanish, though. It just gets scheduled. Arrange a sleepover for the kids, or wait until they're deeply asleep behind a locked bedroom door. Bring up a bottle of wine or champagne, the strawberries if you miss them, a few tea candles, whatever flips the switch for the two of you. Then stop managing the evening and let it happen on its own. Daylight hours are different. Keep the children in the picture rather than shutting them out, and don't act carelessly or crudely with each other while they're watching, because that teaches them exactly the wrong lessons about how partners treat one another. Fill the days with things everyone can share, bowling, mini golf, a shopping trip, an hour at the ice rink, and save the quiet, grown-up hours, the talking and cuddling and whatever else, for after bedtime when the house finally goes still.
Priorities move next, and if they don't move on their own, they ought to. With kids in the house, your own wants slide into the passenger seat. Theirs take the wheel. The impulse buy on a designer bag or a few hundred dollars dropped on a new console stops being a casual thing. Money, time, energy, all of it funnels toward the small copies of yourselves now living under your roof.
That reads bleaker than it needs to. You can still have the things you want; the timeline simply stretches. Set aside a little from each paycheck for the treats, whether that's the bag, the game system, a trip you keep postponing, or the four-star restaurant you've been curious about for a year. Having children doesn't mean surrendering every pleasure. It means your kids get taken care of first and you come after. The waiting can drag on, sure, but you'll be glad you were the kind of parent who waited, and the trade looks worth it from the far side.
Then there's money itself, which deserves its own line because children are genuinely expensive. Chris Wadsworth, writing for USA Today in 2012, put the total cost of raising a child to adulthood for an average middle-class American couple at roughly $250,000. Melanie Hicken, reporting for CNN Money in 2013, landed a little lower at about $240,000, still an enormous number. The money disappears into housing, food, doctor visits, school, childcare, clothes, sports, music or dance lessons, birthday parties, gifts, vacations, entertainment, and eventually college, and the list keeps unrolling past that. For a family already stretched, Wadsworth notes, it adds real strain. Some parents end up working a second or even a third job to cover it.
None of that erases the fact that raising a kid is one of the better things a person gets to do. You make it through on stubbornness and a lot of love. Build a budget around what the children actually need and your finances come into sharper focus. If the numbers keep slipping away from you, there are people whose job is to help you wrestle them back. Live inside what you earn, give your kids steady love and backing, and that effort registers with them.
Communication is the last piece, and it catches people off guard. How you talk to your spouse, and to everyone else, may need adjusting, because children absorb your speech patterns and then play them back in front of peers, teachers, siblings, and total strangers. To a child, your way of speaking is the correct way, so they copy it. Even toddlers are watching constantly, cataloging what counts as normal behavior, and the unflattering habits get copied right alongside the good ones. That means cutting out the curse words and the put-downs aimed at your partner. Couples who are used to shouting at each other need the shouting to stop once kids are around, or at the very least to happen only when the children are elsewhere. Keep the words you use about each other kind in front of them, and if nothing kind comes to mind, the old advice holds: say nothing at all.
- Dr. R. Y. Langham