The challenges of children in your marriage - Essay Example

The impact children have on marriage Larissa Montavon of Miami The Impact Children have on Marriage For this interview, I chose my grandmother Elizabeth Marechal because she has had seven children and I wanted to understand how she was able to maintain her happiness in her marriage as well as having so many children. In my opinion, maintaining the balance the care and interests of one’s children and husband is a key challenge that defines the stability and happiness of a family. The goal of this interview was to better understand the challenges that children bring in a couple and how a couple’s life changes as a result.

Elizabeth was born on the 23rd of February 1921 and has been married to my Grandfather Andre Marechal for seventy-three years. She got married to him at the age of 23 and never cohabited beforehand. Both my grandparents are white Caucasians, born middle lower class for my grandmother (she was born in the countryside) and midlle class for my grandfather (he was born in the city). As they built their lives up, they became very wealthy with a society my grandfather brought up called “Andre Marechal” which specializes in electric households appliances.

Therefore they were in the higher (upper) class of society starting at about age forty. Elizabeth and Andre have three daughters and five sons my mother being the last of the seven children (my mother has a twenty year age difference with her eldest sister!). Finally, it is important to know they both extremely believe in religion and are catholics. In my opinion my Grandmother has a very “old school” education. She is quite stuck up about these kind of subjects and had an education where it wasn’t accepted to talk about such things.

After much convincing, my grandmother agreed to share some of her unique experiences she had with raising seven children in her long marriage. In her opinion, children brought significant challenges as well as many advantages in her life. Raising children required a lot of patience and dedication on her part. As a mother, she had to ensure that each child’s need were met on a daily basis in a manner that would satisfy the child while also balancing on the limited nature of resources. Each of her seven children had unique characteristics, which made it necessary to deal with family matters on a case-by-case approach.

However, the task of disseminating life knowledge and discipline took a more uniform and general approach. Paying attention to specific details about every child was one of the most challenging tasks for my grandmother. It meant increased levels of attention from morning to nightfall, which reduced the amount of time she had to spend with my grandfather. Fortunately, for her, my grandfather was patient, supportive, and understanding, played his roles as a provident father, and measured disciplinarian.

Much of the challenges arose because she was left with the children for much longer as my grandfather gave most of his time to the family business. The challenges that my grandmother faced are consistent with the kind of difficulties that often confront parents of large families particularly with regard to time and the level of resources that are required for the purposes of upbringing. My grandmother’s impression of raising children revealed the level of anxiety, fears, and hopes as she watched her children grow up and transit to mature young adults.

The definitive moments are usually during the adolescence age (Rosenberg, & Center for Nonviolent Communication, 2003). She had no prior experience of handling adolescents and required much support from my grandfather particularly where boys were concerned. Habits and characters acquired during adolescence are generally likely to stick with young adults and constitute part of their characters as they develop to full maturity. The awareness of this fact made my grandmother wary of the restive nature of some of her children, who expressed some form of a determined shift from traditional rigidity of values as they sought to explore new realities beyond the confines of the home environment.

My grandmother admitted that she was always interested in the kind of company that her children kept because company is the most determining aspect of character for young adolescents developing into adulthood. In many families, mothers are usually tasked with counseling their adolescent daughters while fathers focus much on their adolescent sons. However, in the case of my grandmother, there was no clear distinction between my grandmother and grandfather’s roles as any of them counseled and advised any of the children.

However, my grandmother did much of the counseling and guiding due to the busy schedule that my grandfather kept. Resolving of conflicts between the children was a common feature in the family. Conflicts ranged from issues relating to common childhood mischief to cases of sibling rivalry among the children. My grandmother saw such situations as opportunities to inculcate appropriate family values within the children. There was a sense in which some of the children sought to show themselves in terms of superiority.

In such cases, my grandmother would resolve the matters in ways that would rebuild harmony, love, compassion, and support among the children. On this note, it became appropriate to consider providing for the children on equal measure in order to discourage the growth of negative competition between them. Such matters were largely considered within the family circle in ways that helped nurture positive qualities among the children. To some extent, my grandmother felt that the task of raising children ate into the time meant for other personal activities such as having some good time with my grandfather outside the homestead.

She was not entirely comfortable with leaving the children behind for long as she proceeded on other matters. Nevertheless, my grandmother insisted that raising children is a fulfilling task and that offers some kind of natural satisfaction especially on the part of the mother. She connected the feeling to some kind of a natural maternal instinct, which in her opinion, is God-given. The same would apply to the kind of satisfaction that a responsible father would feel when providing for his family (Reasoner, & Lane, 2007).

My grandmother is satisfied with the manner in which she managed to raise her children to full maturity and explains that it took good planning, energy, consistency, and understanding to balance between the needs of her children and those of her husband. The balance involved offering support to my grandfather in times of low business and encouraging him in other matters that touched on the family and his personal life. However, she considers the cordial relationship she kept with my grandfather, and the amicable approach to all points of conflict as some of the major determinants to the high levels of resilience and success that attended to her efforts.

References Cummings, A.M. (2013). Meaningful Marriages and virtue Retrieved from Cummings, A.M. (2013). Parenthood: choices and challenges Retrieved from Cummings, A.M. (2013). Parenthood: choices and challenges Retrieved from http://www.courses.miami.edu/lecture1 http://www.courses.miami.edu/lecture1 http://www.courses.miami.edu/lecture1 Olson, D.H., DeFrain, J., & Skogrand, L. (2010). Marriages and families: Intimacy, diversity and strengths. 7th ED. McGraw Hill: Boston Reasoner, R. W., & Lane, M. L. (2007).

Parenting with purpose: Five keys to raising children with values and vision : a complete guide for parents, grandparents, and caregivers. Fawnskin, CA: Personhood Press. Rosenberg, M. B., & Center for Nonviolent Communication. (2003). Raising children compassionately: Parenting the nonviolent communication way. Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press. Questions of the interview 1) How long have you been married? (73 years) 2) How did each kid you have affect your marriage? If yes in what way did each child affect it?

( the first kid was the very challenging because it wasn’t what I expected, money wasn’t flowing so that was stressful didn’t have any baby blues though) ? second child a lot of baby blues still the same financial situation the rest were fine but the last child was very tough as I was already having grandchildren and had to have yet another child at the same time. I felt like this wasn’t the time to have another child but being very religious I had no choice. 3) Did you feel any dissatisfaction after having your children?

I was extremely tired throughout all of these years having children moments with my husband completely disappeared all my life surrounded my kids. But at that time you didn’t question your relationship, a wife took care of the kids and that was that.. 4) Which birth affected your marriage most? The first one because after that it never stopped 5) What was your number one stressor in your life while having kids? In the beginning it was finances but as time went on and we won more money it was their success. 6) Did religion help you through everything?

is it a big strength for you? I could never have live without religion I pray everyday go to church everyday 7) What is your family of origin, what were your models? Were they healthy? Both my models I belive were healthy but we really didn’t know anything about relationships people didn’t share none of my parents were abused or abusive. 8) Did you cohabitate with him before the wedding? 9) Were all of your children planned? No but contraception is something I do not accept 10) What was the worst phase of your marriage?

When I found out my husband had a mistress for a few years. This was extremely difficult on myself as I don’t believe in divorce or in sharing your feeling it is not a woman’s place to have a say in those kind of things. 11) What was your income level with you first child and your last child? Did that influence your happiness? This didn’t influence my happiness but it stressed me out more when money was tight. Money was tight in the beginning and was more and more affluent as time went by 12) Name one difficulty you have faced in your marriage and what you did to solve/deal with this difficulty.

I have had many difficulties I didn’t solve them I shut my mouth dealt with it on my own and moved on you have to understand I was not educated in a way where women would talk about the problems of their marriages and dwell on them. 13) How did you “select your mate?” In other words, what initially attracted you to them? I liked the fact that he came from the city also our parents knew each other and thought it would be a good match. 14) If you had to give me one advice to making your marriage last what would it be?

Don’t think its easy never abandon though 15) If you were to go back in time would you have gotten married and had all of these children? Yes I wouldn’t have done anything differently every child brought me a lot of joy and happiness even though it was challenging.