Can anyone offer ideas/tips for managing UA time when you have very young children? We have a 16 month old and I am pregnant with #2. Our first child has some health problems and requires me to wake up with him several times a night so we are usually very tired by 8pm!

Some ideas I have thought of:
- Shower together before bed at night
- Grandpa babysit for 1 dinner out a week

Any more?

Thank you

Hi alis! Getting grandpa to babysit would be good, but in order to be effective, you need to go out much more than one night a week. Showering together is nice too, but that doesn't really count because it needs to be in 2 to 4 hour BLOCKS to have an effect. The best UA time is spent AWAY from home. When you are home, it is too easy to get interrupted and drawn back into household issues. So, it is really important to plan the majority of your 15 hours AWAY from home.

Since you are tired by 8pm, you might plan your night out from 5pm to 8pm several nights a week and then several hours on the weekend. You don't want to plan your UA time when you are tired, but when you feel your best.

Dr Harley wrote this about spending UA time at home:


I would sit down with your H and schedule out 15 hours for the week. Line up babysitters and perhaps join a church that has a co-op.

I would make your UA time your priority, over less important things like childcare and jobs. It is your child's best interest for his parents to have a romantic, stable marriage.

Caring for Children Means Caring for Each Other

Are you at home with your kids in the day? If so, trade your daytime babysitting for someone else's evening sitting. They can babysit in the evening for you.

I know you say you are tired by 8, but if you go out for 3 hours, that tiredness will disappear. Just walk away from all the domestic stuff and you'll feel great.

Hmm, that would mean leaving hiring a babysitter for my toddler and newborn for a minimum of 4 days per week then? We don't go to church and we just moved here, only grandpa can help out and he is elderly with a heart condition. Because once my husband is home, the toddler goes to bed 2 hours after. That doesn't seem reasonable for my family, I don't think MB is for us. However, thank you very much for the information

alis, did you read the article I linked? You might find it very compelling:


Caring for Children Means Caring for Each Other
Willard F. Harley, Jr., Ph.D.


Children desperately need parents who stay married to each other, and love each other. Their future depends on it. Yet, their parents are very likely to lose their love for each other after they arrive, because they forget why they married.

They didn't marry to raise children -- they married to meet each other's intimate emotional needs. And the presence of children tends to make them think that they don't have time and energy to meet those needs anymore. When that happens, they lose their primary motive to be married -- their love for each other.

<snip>

When opportunity for undivided attention is taken from a couple, the meeting of intimate emotional needs is no longer possible. And when the meeting of intimate emotional needs is no longer possible, the love a man and woman have for each other withers and dies. And when their love for each other is gone, the risk of divorce is extremely high.

Couples marry because they think their romantic relationship will continue throughout their lives. And it would, if they were to continue meeting each other's intimate emotional needs. But as soon as their children arrive, there is a very high likelihood that their romantic relationship will end, because they cannot find time to give each other undivided attention. And with the end of their romantic relationship, their marriage is at risk.

continued here

The MB radio show today, 10-11, is about how couples fall out of love when they neglect their marriages for family time. Go here: http://www.marriagebuilders.com/mb2.cfm?recno=12 and click on rebroadcast. After 10-12 you can listen to the show in archives by pulling up the show from today's date.

Yes, I did read it (thank you for the link) and I don't disagree with it. But I also find it completely unreasonable to have to leave my breastfeeding newborn and toddler with someone else for up to 4 days per week in order to preserve my marriage. That's simply not reasonable, IMO. I understand that UA is very important but I also thought that there was perhaps ways to compromise UA when children were exceptionally young (ie. have the same amount of UA at home and ideas on how to do it). One cannot simply leave a newborn the same way they would leave a pre-teen.

I understand this is not the place to argue any of MB's principles so I will just leave it at that and say it is not going to work for me at this time.

But no one is suggesting any such thing. The suggestion is to leave them for 2 to 4 hour blocks 4 days a week. NOT 4 ENTIRE DAYS. There is no reason that children can't be left with babysitters for 15 hours a week, that is ridiculous. Breast fed babies don't have to be fed every hour. They are fed every 3-4 hours. And even breast fed babies can be fed a bottle of breast milk by a babysitter. Women do it all the time.

People can and do find ways to do this all the time. All it takes is a willingness to place your marriage FIRST. Placing your marriage first is in the best interest of your children. They won't be harmed by your going out 4 times a week, but they will be harmed by an unstable marriage.

The 2-4 hour blocks means their father would not see his children during the week, as he returns home from work 2 hours before their bedtime. If I am being told that I need to go out of the house 4x a week minimum which we didn't even do when we were childless, in order to prevent my marriage from becoming unstable then quite simply this program is not for me, sorry. Sorry. Thank you for your time.

You're making your children a priority over your marriage, alis. This is a dangerous habit to get into, and you're doing it immediately upon their birth. This habit will become a lifestyle and your marriage will drift down continually on your priority list until you will have forgotten why you married the guy in the first place. We see that here frequently.

Your desire to nurture your children is commendable, but misguided when it comes to placing them over your husband. Your marriage should always come first. Your children deserve to live in a home where their parents are together and are each other's main priority.

I'm not surprised that you don't want to hear this, because as a new mother you probably talk to a lot of people and read a lot of parenting articles that stress the new-age philosophy of putting the children first. To hear advice to the contrary can be jarring, but when you really think about it you will come to the realization that making your marriage the main priority in your life is what is best for your children.

I won't disagree for a second that children are helpless little creatures that wouldn't make it without your nurturing and day-to-day protection. But you can do so without ruining your relationship with their father, and they'll be happier and better off for your efforts to do so.

You are very welcome.

I am having a very hard time with this, I admit. However, I will concede that MB has never steered me wrong before (I read it when I first started dating my husband 4 years ago).

So here is my next question, if you guys don't mind. Can you help me find UA time here?

I am a stay at home mom

Every other Monday/Tuesday-Friday: works 6am-4pm (toddler in bed by 7pm). On Wed/Thurs, he trains 4:30-6pm.
Every other Monday/Saturday/Sunday: off work (with 1-2 hours training per day).

Saturday & Sunday, I will see if my FIL (grandpa) can assist for 4 hours x 2. I guess every other Monday too. However, we are not comfortable yet with leaving the home after bedtime due to my son's health issues (he has severe acid reflux disease which gets progressively worse at bedtime, my FIL cannot deal with this himself and I cannot afford a nurse) as I don't work.

Believe me, I have really been making strides to improve things (that being said, our marriage is still good, just looking for more US ideas), I quit my job that required me to work 7pm-4am and night school just so we could be together more.

alis, the basic issue I see here is that you have placed your marriage as the LAST priority and are trying to squeeze it in AFTER everything else. If he can find time for less important things like his training, career, etc, then why can't you find time for something more important like your marriage?

My point is that the issue is the lack of importance you place on your marriage. When you start seeing your marriage as the first priority instead of the LAST, I predict you will find the time. But willingness needs to come first. If you continue to place your marriage LAST, after every thing else, there is no amount of tips to your schedule that will make a difference because you will always find reasons to put it off.

Change your priorities FIRST.

How do I approach/explain to reduce priorities, when something is very important to him? I mean that in a serious way - I can & will approach him about that, tonight, but I want to do it in a way that does not seem confrontational or making him lose part of his identity (20 years in this particular sport that he trains for).

Believe me, my marriage IS my #1 priority - I wouldn't be here if it wasn't. My parents divorced last year (33 years) after my mom's affair - I saw first hand what complacency in marriage can ultimately do. I'd be lying if I said that wasn't in the back of my mind constantly and that I don't want it to happen to us many years in the future. I just need help to figure out how to really go about it. My husband was my first serious relationship - I'm 26, I'm not very experienced on how to support a marriage growing over time after obstacles are thrown in (and by obstacles I mean children and less time, lol).

For example, our sex life is fairly infrequent now compared to before (1-2x a week now, compared to nightly before kids), last night in bed I told him that this bothered me that he was less interested (his training sessions have been particularly intense and he is a bit older than me so he is really tired after). I know part of it is that he is not very attracted to a pregnant woman (this happened with the first child too), but I told him it was important to me. He was receptive to that and said that we are going to actively work on it. So he is receptive but I also want to know how to approach things properly.

Explain to him that you need to find 15 hours of UA time in order to maintain the romantic love in your marriage. TELL HIM YOU WANT TO STAY IN LOVE WITH HIM and that spending 15 hours together per week is the minimum to stay in love. Explain to him the whys and hows, get his agreement and then work out a WRITTEN schedule for him. Print out the 2 articles we linked and let him read them. Keep it very positive and let him help you find the necessary 15 hours.


Go listen to the rebroadcast of MB right now and you will hear Dr Harley discussing this very issue on yesterdays show. It will be on there until the new show starts at 12. cst

One idea might be for you to go to his training with him. Is it at a gym? We have other members who get great UA time exercising together.

Okay thank you. I will talk to him about this tonight and update after, probably tomorrow.

Yes, and this is what we used to do before children. The gym is actually in our home, we have a separate private facility in our garage. Usually, when he trains, I sit with our son in the play area we built and watch him train/chat. We are there the whole time, it is not "UA" time but it is still time spent together.

oh, ok, so it doesn't count. Maybe a better way for him to get his training time is to do it in the morning when you are all asleep so it doesn't cut into your UA time. Again, it is much less important than your marriage.

I would schedule the UA time first and then he can find time for training with what is left over. But your marriage should not be the thing that gets the leftovers.