Читать книгу The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself - Steve Biddulph - Страница 12

When you’re young you have dreams that reach far into the future. But as a parent of young children, your dreams get a little more short-term. During these years, your fondest hope is probably of getting half an hour’s break and having a good lie down. A wild fantasy would be reading the newspaper right through or getting to bed with enough energy to make love to the stranger that is your partner. Before you know it, you’ve got teenagers and all the mental challenges they bring. If you’re not careful, life can be what happens to you while you’re too busy to make other plans.

Today, as you’re reading this, your family life may be going really well. Or you may be going through a difficult patch. If it’s the latter, this is hardly surprising: family life is tough and we get very little help. We do not have a tradition in our culture for making marriage work, only for making it endure, which is not the same thing. The saying, ‘You make your bed and lie in it’ was very big in the mid-twentieth century – hardly an introduction to the craft of love. Its companion saying ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ was not much of a guide to parenting either!

Because of the poor quality teaching that we get in human relationships, many people find family life to be a disheartening part of their lives. Researchers have found that many people feel more in control and successful at work than at home. Instead of being a harbour of comfort and security, home can be the place where you feel least successful.