Couch Time
Practice “couch time.” When the workday is over, take ten or fifteen minutes to sit on the couch as a couple and talk with each other. Why?
As professionals, we cannot overstate how necessary a healthy husband-wife relationship is to the emotional well-being of a child. The most basic emotional needs of childhood is the need to know that a child’s world is safe and secure. Strong marriages create a sense of certainty; a trustworthy love that is predictable. What takes place between parents establishes that sense of confidence. Couch time provides children with a visual sense of your togetherness. It is one tangible way that children measure Mom and Dad’s love commitment to each other, which creates a sense of security for the child
How amazing it is to realize that children who are only two and three years old have a radar device that hones in on parental conflict! When a child perceives more weakness than strength, a low-level anxiety is produced that ultimately affects every other learning discipline. Children know intuitively, just as you and I knew when we were growing up, that if something happens to Mom and Dad, their whole world will collapse. If the parents’ relationship is always in question in the mind of a child, then that child tends to live his life on the brink of emotional collapse.
In contrast, when a child has confidence in his parents’ relationship, he is emotionally free to get on with his life. This freedom is a truth that Ryan realizes but can not articulate. When there is harmony in the husband-wife relationship, there is an infused stability within the family. A strong marriage provides a haven of security for children as they grow.
It does not matter how old your child is, or what behavioral challenge you may be facing; the absence of couch time is a slow-drip contributor to poor behavior.
Researchers are now reporting that one of the most reliable predictors of a child’s emotional security and cognitive success is not the mother-child “attachment,” but the husband-wife attachment. There is something about the demonstrable love of Mom and Dad’s relationship that profoundly shapes the neural-wiring of a child’s developing brain.* While the power of this relationship is well documented in theological literature, it is just now coming into focus in the neural sciences.
From infancy onward, children possess a survival mechanism that intuitively uses Mom and Dad’s relationship as the baseline for their sense of security. If the child perceives marital stability, his/her brain develops one way. However, if the child perceives instability, his/her brain is forced to work another way, transferring productive energy into coping patterns, rather than into healthy growth.
Please note the intricacy of this process. It is not just conflict in the marital relationship that produces toxic brain messages, but equally toxic is the absence of healthy markers on which children take their cues. In other words, there may not be any relational stress in the marriage, but in a child’s developing world, even “perceived stress” can alter the blood chemistry, thereby triggering neurologic coping responses, that, in turn, negatively affect brain development.
As shared in all our curricula, couch time between Mom and Dad provides the visual marker for which children look. When sons and daughters connect their intuitive need to know their world is safe and secure with the confirmation of Mom and Dad’s love relationship, then “normal” growth takes place. As it relates to correction, couch time confirms a child’s sense of security, which encourages healthy behavior; and that translates into less correction. . .
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