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Overview
A Win-Win Approach to Marriage and Parenting
All parents want their children to be happy. But many couples today go too far, letting everything revolve around their kids. This hurts the children and the marriage. The good news is you don't have to choose between your spouse and your kids. Drawing from the latest research in neuroscience and his study of families around the world, David Code explains why putting your marriage first actually produces happier kids.
In this book you'll learn how confronting your anxiety liberates your children to establish their own identity, learn self-reliance, and become more confident adults. You'll also discover why you already married the perfect spouse, and why it’s okay to have tough arguments. A good marriage sets a great example for your children's future relationships, and that's win-win for the whole family.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780824526153 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | PublishDrive |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | PUBLISHDRIVE KFT |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 327 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First
By David Code
The Crossroad Publishing Company
Copyright © 2009 David CodeAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8245-2615-3
CHAPTER 1
How We Create a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Our Kids
Sabrina and her husband, Rick, were facing some financial challenges. Rick didn't get the bonus they were expecting, and they were falling behind on their mortgage payments. Every time they tried to discuss the issue, however, they escalated into an argument. As a result, they began to distance from each other. Rick spent more time at the office, and Sabrina paid more attention — perhaps even too much attention — to the kids. When the couple was together, they stuck to banal topics and avoided bringing up any touchy issues — especially money. But unresolved tension pervaded the house, and Sabrina started having trouble sleeping.
One night when she was lying awake, she heard her five-year-old son, Ian, cough in his sleep. Sabrina had already been concerned that perhaps he had asthma or allergies, so when she heard him cough, her anxiety really spiked.
Reflecting on it more, she decided this cough must be serious, and some action needed to be taken. Sabrina got up, woke Ian, gave him cough medicine, went back to bed, and fell asleep almost immediately.
The next morning, as usual, things were tense between Sabrina and her husband as he headed out the door to work. Sabrina was sitting in the kitchen, alone and upset, when her son came downstairs and coughed again. This time, she picked up the phone and made an appointment with the pediatrician.
The pediatrician's examination of Ian was inconclusive: it could be allergies, he said, or perhaps just a virus. He also noted that Ian hadn't awakened from his cough the night before, or even complained about it. But Sabrina wanted to play it safe, so she persuaded the doctor to prescribe allergy medicine for her son. After all, it was spring, and other mothers had told her how they sent their kids to school with inhalers every day, just to be safe. Who knew how bad the dust and pollen counts might get?
When It Comes to Attention, Less Is More
Sabrina's example is typical of what's happening in many families today across the country. Why do so many of today's children suffer from emotional and health problems? We parents are often causing or exacerbating these problems through Projection onto Our Children. We live in denial about our distant marriages and our stressful lives, but all that anxiety can spill over onto our kids, much to their detriment.
Projection onto Our Children is an unconscious defense mechanism, triggered by a well-intentioned but primitive part of the human brain. Our brain is trying to save us from pain by diverting our attention from our unpleasant anxiety (regarding our distant relationship) to a more pleasant and reassuring image (e.g., becoming best friends with our children or putting them first in our lives).
Our brain has good intentions, but projection just keeps us living in denial: we are projecting our anxiety onto our kids in the form of overparenting. When anxiety becomes unbearable in our brains, we may focus on a small problem in our child in order to take our minds off our own anxiety. This blows the child's problem out of proportion and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of troubled children. Projection may save us from pain, but it does so at the expense of our children's well-being.
We will address three essential points in this chapter:
1. We parents have gone too far: our anxious attention to our kids is doing more harm than good;
2. We need to recognize the four steps by which we project our anxiety onto our children; and
3. Becoming your child's best friend is just as harmful as anxious worry.
This information is crucial to parents because once we recognize our projection, we can refocus on the real source of the problem: anxiety in ourselves and tension in our marriage.
By tracing a child's anxiety back to the mother, some readers may think I'm blaming the mother for creating the problem. The problem of projection, however, stems from the distant marriage contributed to by both mother and father. Both parents always have a role.
What's more, in most cases, both spouses are innocently unaware of this pattern and have the best of intentions, so how can anyone be blamed? There is no malice here: only a lack of awareness.
Couples Who Live Like Roommates Harm Their Kids
In the 1950s, psychiatrist Murray Bowen set up an experiment at the National Institute of Mental Health where he observed how schizophrenic patients interacted with their families. For eighteen months or more, several patients lived with their entire families in a ward where Bowen and his staff could observe and record their behaviors 24/7.
As Bowen observed and compared the behavior of these families, a pattern emerged. He described "a striking emotional distance between the parents in all the families. We have called this the 'emotional divorce.' ... When either parent becomes more invested in the patient than in the other parent, the psychotic process [in their child] becomes intensified."
Bowen's research suggested that a couple's marriage has more of an impact on their child's well-being than we realize. As two spouses avoid each other in a distant marriage, one spouse may focus instead on one of their children. Taken to the extreme, a distant marriage may lead to a child-focus that contributes to symptoms in the child's body or mind.
For his work, Bowen was named as one of the top ten most influential psychiatrists in the last twenty-five years, and his insights are borne out every day among counselors, ministers, and researchers. I will never forget the words of a doctor from Columbia Medical School who specializes in children's cancer. She said, "I seldom worry about a child's prognosis when I see her parents fighting with each other. Cancer is a crisis, and all that stress has to go somewhere. It's the kid whose parents are distant and reserved that I worry about."
In the name of love, we intervene too often in our child's welfare. Our children are precious gifts, and of course we would do nothing to harm them — except hamper their ability to stand on their own two feet. Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed that the greatest detriment to children was the unlived life of their parents. When the tension goes up in our marriages, we may subconsciously escape by focusing on someone else around us, often our kids. The New York Times family columnist and author Judith Warner writes:
Studies have never shown that total immersion in motherhood makes mothers happy or does their children any good. On the contrary, studies have shown that mothers who are able to make a life for themselves tend to be happy and to make their children happy. The self-fulfillment they get from a well-rounded life actually makes them more emotionally available for their children — in part because they're less needy. ... [However,] we manage not to acknowledge, despite endless clues from our children's doctors and teachers, that our preferred parenting style is not terribly conducive to promoting future happiness. We persist in doing things that are contrary to our best interests — and our children's best interests. And we continue, against all logic, to subscribe to a way of thinking about motherhood that leaves us guilt-ridden, anxious, and exhausted.
It's time for us to question the status quo, because the status quo is not working. Many of us have come to take for granted that total immersion parenting raises happier kids. And yet, as we look around at our family and friends, where is the evidence? How can all the anxiety, guilt, and fatigue caused by today's parenting style yield happier kids if the parents are increasingly isolated and unhappy themselves? We need to face the fact that the emperor has no clothes — today's children and their parents are suffering more, not less, despite all our frenetic investment of time and attention. In the next section, we will begin to examine how we've created a monster — a parenting monster that is gnawing away at our families' well-being.
How We Pass On Our Baggage
It was a snowy winter day when I blew into Dr. David Sherry's office to interview him, but I warmed up quickly when he started to tell me about his practice. Dr. Sherry is a pediatric rheumatologist at the nation's top-ranked Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Medical School. I had heard about his work with over fourteen hundred cases of children who suffer from amplified musculoskeletal pain: excruciating pain in their bodies. By the time kids come to him, they have usually undergone multiple tests that have not identified any obvious source of the pain, and multiple medications have failed to provide any relief.
Dr. Sherry has noticed a common pattern in the parents he has met with. They tend to suffer from anxiety, and they make great efforts on behalf of their kids, even to the point of exhaustion. It's as if these parents are hypochondriacs, but instead of imagining themselves to be sick, they (unconsciously) make their child sick, in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Given the family psychodynamics, a minor pain complaint can increase in severity and dysfunction until these children cannot attend school or go out with friends. Many also develop other symptoms such as headaches, stomachaches, insomnia, dizziness, and breathing difficulties.
"The kids eventually start believing it, too," Sherry says, "and then the parents go from doctor to doctor, bringing with them reams of medical files and test results. These parents keep shopping doctors until they find a physician willing to confirm their amateur diagnosis."
Dr. Sherry jokingly refers to his treatment as a "parent-ectomy." He stops all medications, limits parental contact, and conducts a psychological evaluation. The children also undergo six hours of exercise each day for three weeks, which not only increases blood flow to their muscles, but also helps them sleep better.
His cure rate is over 88 percent, and the cure lasts at least five years, according to his follow-up evaluations.
Despite his success, Dr. Sherry is concerned about how widespread the problem is. Lately, he sees more kids who are anorexic, depressed, or suicidal. They may even act out with drugs, behavior disorders, or promiscuous sex. He sometimes feels as though he's just putting Band-Aids on an epidemic of symptoms, rather than addressing the family dynamics that cause these problems. He remarks, "I see many children suffer due to the stress of covert marital discord. When spouses distance from each other, they sometimes make their child the center of their lives, which interferes with the natural weaning process essential to healthy development. The best gift you can give your kids is to create a good marriage. Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done and getting the family to address these underlying issues can be too threatening for them."
As a pediatrician and a minister, Dr. Sherry and I see many troubled children from families in which the parents believe their marriage is good merely because they never raise their voices at one another. But their relations are characterized by distance: the husband may work long hours or travel often, or perhaps he bowls in three different leagues a week. We'll discuss Distancing from Your Spouse in chapter 4, but for now, let's just say it's almost as if the husband has checked out of the marriage.
Either party can be the cause, though, and both partners play some role: perhaps the husband checked out because his wife became too focused on the kids, or perhaps the wife began to "marry" her kids because the husband was emotionally unavailable. In any event, her focus frequently falls on one child in particular. As the author and child psychologist Madeline Levine memorably observes, "When a marriage is cold, a child's bed is a warm place to be."
It may seem child-friendly to give a child more attention, but if a caregiver makes the child the center of her life, it puts too much pressure on the kid. The two may become best friends rather than parent-child, making it difficult to set the boundaries by which a child learns to work on teams or respect the authority of her teachers. If a parent leans too much on a child to meet her intimacy needs, this creates a co-dependence between parent and child that hampers the child's social skills with her peers.
On a subconscious level, our brain has the best of intentions when it diverts our attention from the painful reality of our anxiety to an overfocus on our child. But this projection inadvertently prolongs and intensifies our problems by keeping us in denial. Instead of addressing the problems in our marriage or in ourselves that led to our high anxiety, we ignore our pain. On some level, we convince ourselves that pouring our attention onto our child is loving, unselfish, and altruistic. But the child soaks up our anxiety until her fragile nervous system hits overload, and then she may develop a symptom.
The Four Steps of Projection onto Our Children
How do a parent's intangible feelings of anxiety become tangible, physical symptoms in her child? Returning to our earlier story, Sabrina's worry about Ian's cough in the night is an example of how too much negative, worried attention can create a self-fulfilling prophecy in a child.
Shifting our attention from our spouse to a child can make the child into a scapegoat for our own distant marriage. If Sabrina and her husband were more aware of the level of tension between them, they might handle it better. But all that anxiety and intensity in their relationship requires some kind of outlet, so they unwittingly spray some of that anxiety onto their child, and that's when the child develops behavior problems or an ailment.
Think of this spraying of anxiety onto the child in terms of the mind-body connection. Until recently, perhaps we envisioned the mind-body connection as simply our minds influencing our own bodies. For example, maybe we would be more likely to catch a cold when we're stressed because stress lowers our immune response. Many of us who work with families have suspected, however, that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and researchers such as John Cacioppo are beginning to quantify a larger mind-body connection.
Cacioppo is a University of Chicago psychologist who conducted a large study of the impact of relationships on health. He concludes that our minds (unknowingly) affect not only our own bodies but the bodies of our loved ones as well — even on a daily basis. The feelings we subtly communicate, beneath our awareness, are soaked up by our loved ones and affect their own feelings, which in turn affects their own health. And "the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health." In other words, if you're anxious, it may lower your own immune response and make you vulnerable to colds. But anxiety is contagious, so your feelings may be lowering the immune response of your loved ones as well.
In an anxious family such as Sabrina's, where the caregiver is overfocused on her child, this emotional enmeshment between parent and child may program the child to internalize the stress of others and manifest it in health or social problems. It's as if this child becomes the "identified patient" who bears the symptoms of the family's unrest.
Dr. Michael Kerr, a psychiatrist at the Bowen Center for the Study of the Family, studies this kind of projection in families. He stresses that in the pattern of Projection onto Our Children, no one is to blame because every step of this pattern takes place beneath the awareness of the parent and child. The parents don't realize how anxious they are and how they spray their anxiety onto the child by overreacting to a perceived problem in the kid.
When the child finally manifests a symptom, the parents don't realize they're dodging the tension in their marriage by focusing on the child and anxiously seeking a diagnosis. Once a doctor pronounces a diagnosis for the alleged problem, or prescribes a medication, what started out as a small problem suddenly gets blown out of proportion, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that can cripple the child's development.
The steps in the process of Projection onto Our Children are not that complicated once you learn about them, but they may be shocking or overwhelming to read for the first time. Perhaps we've never looked at how we parent from this perspective before. Perhaps we can recognize ourselves in these steps — and that could feel quite uncomfortable.
We parents already have a lot of guilt, and we feel pressure to "get it right." My goal is not to add more guilt. Rather, I'm trying to provide a way of looking at the problem that could be liberating, because if we can get to the root of the cause, we can begin to fix it. We need to address the cause, rather than getting caught up in all the symptoms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First by David Code. Copyright © 2009 David Code. Excerpted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Praise for This Book:,Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction - Three Myths That Are Harming Our Families,
Part 1 - HOW WE HURT OUR KIDS WITHOUT REALIZING IT,
Chapter One - How We Create a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Our Kids,
Chapter Two - Why We Kill Our Kids with Kindness,
Part 2 - HOW WE HURT OUR MARRIAGES, WHICH HURTS OUR KIDS,
Chapter Three - Why We Hurt Those We Love Most,
Chapter Four - The Silent Killer of Marriage,
Chapter Five - Anxiety: The Cause of Drama in Relationships,
Part 3 - THE SOLUTION: TO RAISE HAPPY KIDS, PUT YOUR MARRIAGE FIRST,
Chapter Six - The Grass Is Not Greener: You've Already Chosen Your Ideal Mate,
Chapter Seven - Take a Crash Course on Your Family's History So You Don't Repeat It,
Chapter Eight - Look for the Problem in Yourself First,
Chapter Nine - We Get So Much Good Advice, but Why Can't We Follow Through?,
Chapter Ten - Eat, Walk, and Talk Your Way to a Happier Family,
Notes,