Summers with young children can be tons of fun but also very stressful. For me personally, the summer of 2009 was undoubtedly the longest, most difficult summer of my life. 

Some of the stress of that summer was due to “normal” parenting stuff just because of where our kids were developmentally at that time. 

Despite being enrolled in a variety of summer camps, regularly playing with friends, and having an embarrassing amount of toys, our eight-year-old often roamed the house saying that she was bored and could she please, please, please watch just a little more Disney Channel? 

Our three-year-old was 18 months into what we had come to refer to as her “tornado phase;” she was in constant motion while awake and everything she could reach (and I literally mean everything) ended up on the floor. 

Both kids vigorously resisted going to bed while it was still light outside. The kids seemed to bicker constantly and whininess was at an all-time high. 

But we also had some other things going on that summer that ratcheted up the stress level.

Our eight-year-old niece came and stayed with us for a month while my sister traveled to China to adopt her second daughter.  

We were still reeling from the death of my husband’s father earlier that year. 

We moved into a new house at the end of May and were still in the process of settling in. We had no offers on our old house because of the recession and, as a result, we're making two house payments. 

I had quit my full-time job the previous year and was still in the process of building my private practice. 

My husband and I worked very, very hard to shield our kids from all of this stress and not let it negatively impact our parenting. At the time, we thought we pulled this off pretty well but I can see now that we were both more irritable and impatient with them than was typical. I also know from my professional training and the benefit of hindsight that our behavior definitely contributed to the unprecedented levels of bickering and whininess that we saw that summer. 

We were so consumed with trying to juggle everything that was going on and make sure that the kids were all right that unfortunately, we neglected to do the one thing that would have made doing all of this a lot easier. We didn’t take care of our relationship And, not surprisingly, it bore the brunt of all this stress. 

The tension between me and my husband gradually mounted as the summer dragged on. Virtually everything he did annoyed the daylights out of me and I let him know it. He became incredibly defensive and refused to give an inch on anything. We tried to hide the fact that we weren’t getting along all that well when we were with the kids but made no such effort when we were alone. We argued more that summer than we had at any point in our marriage.

Thankfully we recognized before things got too out of hand that we were headed in a bad direction. We made some changes and were able to pull ourselves out of this cycle but, to be honest, it took us several months and it wasn’t easy. Back then, there was even less information available for couples in our situation, either online or through self-help books, and we definitely did not feel like we could financially afford to work with a coach or therapist at that point in our lives.

While there are a number of ways in which we got off track that summer, I think the biggest problem was that we always put being parents ahead of being partners. Here are three things I wish we had done that summer to maintain a better balance between parenting and partnering…

I wish we had done a better job of utilizing our existing support system. That summer we arranged for either my mom or a babysitter to care for our kids when my husband and I were at work. We didn’t go on date nights because I felt very guilty asking them to watch the kids at times other than when we were at work unless it was something that we “had” to do. We didn’t make spending time away from the kids a priority and that was a mistake.

I wish we had spent a little less money on summer activities for the kids and instead invested it in our relationship. As I mentioned previously, finances were really tight that summer. We both agreed that our top priority was making sure that the kids were engaged in a variety of activities that were fun, engaging, and at least sometimes educational. So our kids did several day camps and we did lots of family field trips to museums, nature centers, etc.

Although these were some of the best times we had that summer, I felt very pressured to enrich our children's lives while they were out of school and that maybe I would be depriving them of some way if we didn’t do these things. In hindsight, this ”kids always come first” mentality came at the cost of our marriage. I know now that our kids would have been perfectly fine if we had done fewer enriching activities or had done more of them at home. This would have freed up both time and money for me and my husband to go out for regular date nights or even to go away for a weekend.     

I wish we had made a point to spend time together at home as a couple. For reasons that I cannot even begin to fathom, that summer we pushed bedtime for the kids back by about an hour. This was a huge mistake because the time after the kids went to bed was normally when we caught up on the day’s events, talked about household business, and/or spent time together as a couple.

I wouldn’t have thought that an hour would have made that much difference but it did. By the time we got the kids settled, we were too tired to do anything else other than what had to be done to get ready for the next day and go to bed ourselves. Another option would have been for us to get up earlier and spend time together before the kids woke up but neither of us enjoy getting up that early so we chose not to go that route either.

In retrospect, we definitely should have come up with a plan for how to regularly spend some time at home focusing on each other and our relationship.