Dad & Mom Make Great Teammates

Making Great Teammates

When we hear the word 'team' , our minds tend to think of some sport's team. We rarely think of the husband and wife as teammates. And yet, God has designed the husband and wife to be the best teammates possible.

Let's think for a moment as to what makes a good team. A good team functions well together. They like being together. They work as one. They have a common goal. This sounds like a good marriage to me! But you might be a bit distracted and wondering why we are discussing marriage in sessions about parenting.

A young child's world is bound up in what he sees at home. They know of no other world. As an infant, they don't understand the implications of employment, neighbors or even church. They only recognize a few voices, that of Dad and Mom and any other siblings around and maybe grandma.

They don't know the difference between good or bad, tall or short. They certainly don't appreciate all the pretty clothes they get dressed up in as a little baby! The parents are the child's world.

The parents have an enormous influence for good or bad on the children. And in this session we will give a detailed explanation of the importance of the husband and wife's relationship on the child.

As your marriage improves, your family will get better. Because of this, we would like to make some suggestions on how to improve this teamwork between husband and wife. If the success of a child's training is dependent upon his parent's marriage, then some main parenting problems will resolve themselves when the husband and wife work together.

My wife and I remember the first time we heard this. One son was having difficulty sleeping through the night because he was startled awake by nightmares. We were also startled awake by his screaming. The couple instructing us at that time suggested that we as husband and wife spend time with each other in front of our children.1

Linda and I typically spend more than 1 hour together later on in the evening after the children go to bed reviewing our lives and praying. But when we reviewed our situation, our children rarely saw Linda and I sit down together in discussion mode.

We deliberately met late in the evening to have an undisturbed time together! However, we saw wisdom in their advice and took up this challenge and started spending ten minutes together (not long) in front of the children several evenings each week.

During this time, the children tried to divert our attention from each other to themselves, but we were forewarned of this problem. We followed our instructor's advice and simply explained this was Mommy and Daddy time. We would talk or play with them later. Within a week our boy's problem solved itself.

One might wonder whether this was a coincidence, but we can assure you it was not. In fact, when his habit started to come back, we started wondering what was the problem. Guess what the problem was? Right, we stopped having Dad/Mom time in front of them. We again started meeting in front of the children, our boy's habit was again corrected.

Why is it that so many odd and peculiar habits of our children can be solved by just sitting together talking in front of our children?

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