We claim we’re too busy to spend time with our spouses, but actually, many of us have shifted our passion from our spouses to our children. We may be over-focusing on our kids to escape an unfulfilling marriage. But if we find it easier to be with our kids than with our spouse, our kids pay a heavy price for that.

As spouses grow more distant in their marriage, they project their distress and needs onto their children. On the surface, things may appear calm between the parents, but kids pick up on everything. Children may soak up the tension in their households until their fragile nervous systems hit overload, and then they act out or develop health problems as a result. Many of today’s children are essentially bearing the burden of misplaced stress from their parents’ distant marriages. Medical research has already confirmed the link between anxious parents and children with emotional or health problems.

A problem in your child may be a wake-up call for your marriage. Once we become aware of how we are (unknowingly) sabotaging our children’s well-being, however, we can step off our current path to harm. My book explains how we mess up our kids with a pattern called Projection Onto Our Children, where our anxious overreaction to a child’s problem creates a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This information is crucial because what you don’t know will hurt you–and your kids. The modern approach to parenting may be turning them into unhappy future adults. Many of today’s parents, with the best of intentions, are on a lose-lose path: losing their own marital happiness and losing their child’s long-term happiness. The family is the basic building block of society, so until we wake up to this silent crisis in our families, no amount of money or educational reform will fix what ails our families or our nation.

We must regain a balance between tending our marriage and nurturing our children. When our marriages meet our intimacy needs, then we can stop marrying our children. This frees up our kids to establish their own identity, learn self-reliance, and become more independent adults. Our marriage can also set a great example for their future relationships. It’s win-win for every member of the family.

Here are some questions on how you relate to your spouse:

• When you and your spouse disagree, do you avoid expressing your feelings and talking things out, preferring rather to “keep the peace”?
• Do you worry after an argument that perhaps you’re on your way to divorce?
• Do you sometimes find it easier to spend time with your kids than with your spouse?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, your marriage may be in trouble, even if it seems peaceful. As John Gottman reminds us, even the best marriages still have chronic, unresolved arguments. Arguing is unpleasant, of course, but emotional engagement is better than avoidance.

Please check out my book by clicking here.

In my book, I explain how we damage our marriages with two patterns–Blaming Our Spouse, and Distancing from Our Spouse. This information is crucial to your family, because blaming your spouse and avoiding him may lead you to focus on your child in unhealthy ways.

We will discover the origins of these patterns in our marriages. We can now learn to reduce both our fight-response of arguing and our flight-response of avoiding our spouse. Modern neuroscience has confirmed that our fight-or-flight response governs much more of our daily behavior than we realize. It’s triggered by an ancient survival instinct we call anxiety.

In our caveman era, anxiety saved our lives by helping us anticipate a threat, but today it causes us to overreact in relationships. By taming the caveman within, we can train our brains to lower that anxiety and become less extreme: less overreactive in our relationships.

How do you view your marriage?

• Do you feel unfulfilled in your marriage?
• Do you worry that perhaps you married the wrong person?
• Do you feel as though you have matured beyond your spouse, whereas he (or she) seems stuck?

Many spouses today secretly wonder if they feel unfulfilled because they married the wrong person. The thing is, there is no evidence that you’d do better by starting over with someone else. The divorce rate for second marriages is 60 percent, and 73 percent for third marriages.

It doesn’t have to be that way. You can check out my book by clicking here.

When we fall in love, that primal chemistry we feel is actually Mother Nature’s way of scoping out our ideal mate. We’re kidding ourselves that the “grass is greener” in a new relationship because we would still carry the same emotional baggage into our next marriage. Marriage is a school for lovers, and the lessons we must learn would be the same the second time around. So, with the exception of spousal abuse, there’s no advantage in switching study partners.

Currently, we don’t realize our families are caught in a vicious circle of anxiety, blame, distancing, and projection—which in turn lead to more anxiety. My book is designed to open our eyes to the severity and urgency of the problem. Happily, we can step out of this vicious circle and build a different kind of marriage that produces happier kids with less baggage.

In my book, I explain how Mother Nature gave us chemistry to ensure we married the perfect mate for us. Once we realize the grass is not greener with someone else, we can settle down to create the best marriage possible.

We also go on safari in our family of origin, to learn how we were programmed for anxiety as children, and how we can reduce it as adults. We’ll also learn:

• how to fix problems in our children by fixing them in ourselves.
• how to build the courage to follow through and do what’s best for our families in the long run.
• how to build a passionate friendship with our spouse that can last a lifetime.

Just One Degree of Change Alters the Rest of Your Life.
The goal of my book is not to sell you a miracle cure, but to help change the course of your family life by only one degree. To use an analogy, imagine you are the captain of a sailing ship. You think you have already charted the best course for your journey, but in fact, the course you have chosen will take you over many stormy, dangerous seas. This book will help you alter the course of your journey by one degree.

One degree of change may not seem like much, but with time, your new course takes you further and further from that original, stormy route. Perhaps this change will be enough to keep your marriage intact, whereas you might otherwise have ended up divorced, or with a troubled child.

For some families, their decks are awash with anxiety, and they cannot even see the shoals that lie ahead. This book will give you the awareness you need to avoid the stormy seas before you run aground.

The goal is not to be perfect–no family, including my own, can claim to be–but to start wherever you are and make that one degree of progress. Regardless of the current state of your family, you can improve your marriage, and raise happier kids. The stakes are too high, so please don’t settle for anything less.

You can check out my book by clicking here.