Private Time Indispensable to Marriage by Dr. Alan Singer

Here is my 3rd and final column describing the couples I surveyed who are celebrating their 30th Anniversaries. It was published in the Home News Tribune on December 17, 2008. Robin and Michael refer to marriage as "an evolving state". Is that a good thing? Read below and I invite you to post a comment.

Nine New Jersey couples who are celebrating their 30th wedding anniversary this year responded to a survey I conducted. This is the third and final column devoted to their responses. I asked each couple what they wanted more time for. Responses included: we want more time together, family vacations and watching our grandchildren grow up. In the fast-paced, two-career family paradigm that is so prevalent, what couples want is more time together. But, two comments concern me. Susan explained, "I wish I made more time for myself and my husband, but in my life, everyone else came first." And Heather stated, "Once the kids were born, we never made time to be alone, just the two of us." Whoa! Red flag!

When couples have a child, they tend to put their marriage on the back burner. That is one reason that researchers have found that marital satisfaction tends to decrease with the arrival of each child. After life-with-a-newborn settles into a routine, couples must dedicate themselves to nurturing their marriage as much, even more than nurturing their children. Children need their parents to have a strong marriage first and foremost; to be Super Mom and Super Dad comes second.

These couples believe that the institution of marriage has changed in 30 years and not necessarily for the better. Susie and Barry: Divorce is less of a stigma. Larry and Judy: People give up too easily and get divorced without trying to resolve their problems. Linda and Leonard added, "Marriage is not a toy, that if you don't like it you find something else; It's a lifetime commitment." Professor Bill Doherty (University of Minnesota) in a lecture delivered in 2001 refers to marriages today in the context of our consumer society where everything is temporary: "New is what sells — the past is meaningless. Only the future counts. Will my rewards be there in the future and am I getting enough out of this relationship?"

Last are several responses to the question, what is the most important thing that you learned about marriage? Most important to Linda and Leonard is, "The effect of being loved and showing love can only make you a better person." (Research supports them on that.) Suzie and Barry go a step further: "Love is not enough to sustain a marriage; you have to work on maintaining the love and the relationship."

Robin and Michael learned that marriage is "an evolving state." That response intrigued me, so I asked them to elaborate. "Nothing in life stays the same; it changes each day with each new experience and the challenges that life presents." They added, "As we grow and mature and are molded by what life brings us, it necessarily affects marriage. The hope is that your spouse helps you through those changes and that your relationship is flexible and can accommodate change."

In a 1998 lecture, psychologist John Gottman similarly describes the importance of "shared meaning." He contends: "Everyone is searching for the meaning of life in this journey of ours. The idea of creating this meaning together with someone else in a family is very key in building this friendship in marriage using the narratives, metaphors, symbols, roles, goals, and rituals that make life meaningful. This has a great impact on friendship in the marriage and on buffering transitions in the marriage, such as partner-hood to parenthood." Thank you to the nine couples who participated in this survey and Happy Anniversary!

Be Counted columnist Dr. Alan Singer is a marriage therapist in Highland Park. Respond to this column via his Web site www.FamilyThinking.com

Home is the Heart of Learning and Where Education Starts by Dr. Alan Singer

The ETS does some things other than scaring teenagers with those 3 dreaded letters--SAT. In this column, I describe a terrific study that was recently sponsored by the ETS. This column was published in the Home News Tribune on 02/20/08.

Three letters send shivers down the spine of most academically conscientious teenagers — ETS. Or maybe you know the Educational Testing Service by the better-known abbreviation — SAT.
SAT questions "are developed by a prestigious team of world-renowned academic experts, who get them from "Jeopardy!' " according to humor scholar Dave Barry. In fact, Barry says "the original idea behind the SATs, as stated in the ETS's Official Historical Statement of Goals and Purposes, was "to sell a huge quantity of No. 2 pencils that we ordered by mistake.' "

When I came across a recent research study published by ETS, I was gratified to learn that there are products of this company that are not designed to primarily put fear in the hearts of adolescents. And what a terrific piece of research they produced, "The Family: America's Smallest School." In the introduction, the study's authors, Paul E. Barton and Richard J. Coley, state, "Improving a child's home environment to make it more conducive to learning is critical if we are to improve the educational achievement of the nation's students." Toward reaching this goal, the authors suggest, "We need to develop cooperative partnerships in which families are allies in the efforts of teachers and schools."

I called Richard Coley to chat about the study. He directs the Policy Information Center of the ETS. "This report seems to have struck a chord," Coley said, adding, "ETS has conducted research reports that go back over 20 years."

Here are several types of family and home conditions that research has found to make a difference in children's cognitive development and school achievements:

Parent-pupil ratio: "In selected international comparisons, the U.S. ranks the highest in percentage of single-parent households, and Japan ranks the lowest." The number of U.S. children who live without two parents has declined to 68 percent (from 77 percent in 1980). An astonishing 44 percent of births to women under age 30 are out of wedlock. "Being raised by a single parent in itself steepens the odds considerably," explains Michael Winerip (The New York Times, December 9, 2007). "On average," suggests Winerip, "the child with a single parent is 2.5 times more likely to repeat a grade." Children need as many contact hours as possible with their parents. I have urged it before in this column, and it bears repeating. Children need quantity time with parents, not just quality time.

Family finances: "Income is an important factor in a family's ability to fund the tangible and intangible elements that contribute to making the home an educationally supportive environment," explain the authors of the study. "Nationally, 19 percent of children live in poverty, and 11 percent of all households are food-insecure. One-third of children live in families in which no parent has full-time year-round employment."

Literacy development: Income has relevance to this category as well. The study's authors found, "By age 4, the average child in a professional family hears about 20 million more words than the average child in a working-class family, and about 35 million more words than children in welfare families." Can we agree that talk is not cheap? The spoken word is vital to each child's education. And the written word? There is an income disparity in this category as well. "Sixty-two percent of high socio-economic status (SES) kindergartners are read to every day by their parents, compared to 36 percent of the kindergartners in the lowest socio-economic status group."

The most interesting finding of the study, in my opinion, is the ability to predict two-thirds of the large differences among states in the National Assessment of Educational Progress eighth-grade reading scores. Four family-home factors stand out, and — to some degree — each is likely to be related to the others: single-parent families, parents reading to young children every day, hours spent watching television (35% of eighth-graders watch four or more hours of television on an average weekday) and the frequency of school absences (one in five students misses three or more days of school each month). Therefore, if you want to help your children academically, keep your marriage strong, read to/with your children frequently, discourage excessive "screen time" and monitor your children's attendance at school carefully.

And one more interesting tidbit that the study's authors found: Make sure your child has a desk or table where he/she can study. Eighty-six percent of U.S. eighth-graders do, which is just above the international average. In our phone conversation, Coley stressed, "Not all kids have a quiet place to study, and they certainly need it."

"Be Counted" columnist Dr. Alan Singer is a marriage therapist in Highland Park. Respond to this column at Dr. Singer's blog http://www.familythinking.com/ or e-mail DrAlanSinger@aol.com "Be Counted" columnists are members of the public.