Everyone naturally focuses on the children. We all want to do the right thing, and we focus on being very careful about protecting our children's psychological, physical and economic future.  And this is good, but sometimes we do forget about the parents and how they are going.

In the busy turmoil of parent hood we often forget the role of the relationship in the family and that it too, needs attention just as much as the children.  After all, it is easy to get distracted by the kids!  They are a handful, and are a pleasure. Naturally, every body does get distracted by the task of parenthood.  And herein lies the problem.  Sometimes, we forget about the relationship of the parents.  After all, relationships need attention too.

This is not a surprising occurrence.  Children, when they are particularly small, consume considerable resources and attention from the family.  Rightly so. However, this can often mean that parents can become extremely tired while doing their best to go to work, pay the mortgage, and look after the kids. When you are in this situation, often the happiest moment for a parent is if they can simply get a good night's sleep once in a while!  If you have your children in close succession then this exacerbates the demands upon the family and resources that it requires.  The same thing can happen in the larger families, where the parents tend to get a little burnt out by the time of the last of the children have come through.

So often we have a situation where a couple fall pregnant, and when the first child is two or three, a couple fall pregnant with their second child.  The end result is that six or seven years later, when the children are more independent and do not require such extensive support and family resources, we have two people do have forgotten how to have a relationship.  This does not happen in all cases, but happens often enough to be worthy of discussion.

Literally, for several years they have been preparing meals, doing domestic chores, going to work, focusing on the needs of their children, and in amongst all this, try to get sleep and some time out.  Sometimes there is not enough energy leftover for the relationship.  I am not suggesting there is no fun in amongst all this time, but rather the good times and hard times, all consume energy and resources.  The other competing factors resources of the family are often financial ones!  I am sure that most of the people that have read this article so far would have been nodding their head in agreement with me.

So what happens is that the parents devote time, and resources, to the demands most immediate and put long-term issues such as their relationship on hold.  The trouble is relationships are not things that look after themselves very readily.  They too, need resources and time.

Sometimes, the parents wake-up several years later, with the children of enough to look after themselves and being independent, and they find that their relationship has changed.  How many times have we seen a situation where a mature couple are sitting at a table in a public area with kids in the age range between 8 and 12, the kids are often doing their own thing and the parents are not talking to each other because they have nothing in common!

So now we need to look at one of the most important foundations of a family and that is the relationship of the parents.  As I have already hinted, the key problem is that the couple have been so distracted that they have not had time to maintain things in common.  The circumstances and the social environment that first attracted them to each other are long gone.  They have been busy for the last few years, and the major focus has been snatching those few quiet moments of quality time mixed with some rare solitude, then back to the kids and work on the normal life demands.

But I have a solution.  Working on the principle that an ounce of care is worth a pound of prevention, the trick is to manage the family for in such a way to ensure that not only do the kids get a fair share of the love and caring, but so do the parents.  And the keys here are proper and effective management of quality time, proactive cooperation between parents and a fair distribution of the workload combined with some reality testing.

There have been many occasions when I have been speaking to a couple and have observed that they have had difficulty in concentrating on what I was saying because they were both so equally fatigued through lack of sleep.  The kids had been suffering the latest viral infection, both parents had the bug as well and both parents had been up all night with the kids.  What really needed to be done was some proper and effective management of the problem.

For example, the night shift should have been taken on rotation.  But what usually happens is one parent gets up to the kids and the other parent gets up to support the first parent.  It's hard to sleep when you feel guilty.  Or, with the first parent disturbs the second parent and then they cannot get back to sleep.  The point is not your sleeping pattern, but the fact that both parents need to sit down and discussed between them who gets what shift, the taking of turns, and making preparations to suit.  Main means some hard decisions, but it also produces cooperation bonding and caring within the relationship.

Effective family management is about tackling hard questions about what to do next and how we are going to cope with the various stresses placed upon the family by having children.

But family management is more than just looking after logistics.  It is also about planning for quality time with the children and with out the children.  It's about sharing of the workload equally, sharing of the personal space and devoting some resources (not to mention time) for the relationship.  Interestingly, relationships seem to work best when they get quality time rather than quantity time.

The trick is to focus on quality time and to plan for it.  Planning means sitting down and talking to each other about issues that arise.  This is very important.  Talking about difficult topics which are emotionally laden can often be like walking through a field seeded with landmines!  So it is very important that each partner do their best not to take offence, be understanding, and tries hard to get their point across in a clear and logical manner.  Not an easy thing to do when you're very tired, distracted all the kids are jumping all over you at the time!

Fortunately, awareness is often enough to make us do things to maintain a relationship.  By being unaware of the need to focus on the relationship, we tend to do so automatically.

I should make the point that there are those relationships that started off for the wrong reason, or just had a bad start.  Even these kinds of relationships can become successful with committed, proactive effort by each partner.  The trick is to work at it.

So let me create an awareness in you that I hope will encourage you to not get too distracted by the demands of parenthood, and remember why you got into the relationship in the first place.

Relationships - Part 2