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What if the tension you’re feeling at home isn’t just about your kids, but about the connection you’ve lost with your spouse?

As parents, we spend so much time pouring into our children that our marriage often gets whatever is left over—if anything at all. Date nights feel inconvenient, expensive, or impossible, especially when life is busy and you’re already exhausted.

But here’s the truth: when your marriage relationship suffers, everything in your home feels harder. It affects your patience, your parenting, and even the emotional tone of your family.

In this episode of Parents Making Time, Anthony and Jennifer share a real season when parenting challenges with their youngest strained not just their energy, but their connection as a couple. What changed everything wasn’t a big breakthrough or perfect circumstances. It was intentional time together, even when it felt inconvenient, and the ripple effects were immediate.

BY THE TIME YOU FINISH LISTENING, YOU’LL DISCOVER:

• Why prioritizing your marriage actually makes you a better parent (and creates a healthier home for your kids)
• The hidden consequences of neglecting intentional time with your spouse, including emotional disconnection and transactional parenting
• Practical, realistic ways to make date night happen in every season of life, whether you’re short on time, money, babysitters, or energy
  
  
  

When you nurture your marriage, you’re not choosing your spouse over your kids—you’re choosing a stronger family culture for everyone. Sometimes the most powerful intentional parenting move you can make is a date night.

Easily improve your intentional parenting efforts at mealtime with our FREE resource, Dinner Conversation Starters.

Download our FREE resource, 30-Second Micro Moments of Intention with Your Kids, created for busy parents like you who need easy, actionable ways to have daily meaningful connections with their kids in less than a minute!

Parenting Questions? Email us at [email protected] (Please note, your question may be featured on the show).

For parenting inspiration, time management ideas, and encouragement for families, follow the hosts' individual accounts:

Anthony Craiker: Instagram | LinkedIn

Jennifer Craiker: Instagram

Interested in joining our free online parenting community? Send us a DM to receive an invite!

Enjoy the show? Leave a rating & review: Apple | Spotify

Transcript

Parents Making Time Ep. 18

Jennifer: [00:00:00] Now we spend a lot of time on this show talking about making time for our kids, but today we are going to talk about making time for our spouses. 'cause as parents, we pour so much into our kids that the marriage relationship can suffer, and yet when our relationship is strong. Everything else in the home feels stronger too, including our kids.

We know what that feels like firsthand. There was a time when we were really struggling with our youngest and honestly, we were just running on fumes around. Then we decided to make a conscious effort to go on a date night every week, just the two of us. Even when it felt inconvenient and it made a huge difference, not just in how we connected with each other, but in how we parented, how patient we were and how our home even felt.

So today we're talking about what to do when you are not feeling connected with your spouse, and how simple intentional time together can bring more joy, more closeness, and a healthier home for everyone involved.

Anthony: This is Parents [00:01:00] Making Time. The show that helps busy parents put family first without burning out. 

Jennifer: We are Anthony and Jennifer Craiker. We don't just give parenting tips. We help you become the parent you want to be.

Anthony: So that time that Jen was talking about with our youngest, our son Ethan, was really difficult.

He was going through those early stages of puberty and he was dealing with some mental health issues, particularly his ADHD, which we hadn't even really been diagnosed yet. And so it was a really challenging time. He was challenging authority. Our authority as parents. And that made for a lot of stress in the home.

And it was just normal stuff that he, he wasn't a bad kid or anything like that, it was just stuff that he was going through. And we as parents were trying to figure out the best way to help him and to parent him. And it was new to us 'cause we hadn't really been through anything quite that dramatic with our other [00:02:00] two, 

Jennifer: it was intense.

Anthony: Yeah. It so it, yeah, it felt really intense and it felt, there was a feeling of tension in the air a lot of times at home. It doesn't mean that every single day was bad, but just on the whole it was a difficult time and it went on for months and so we were struggling. We were struggling as a family as individuals our own.

Kind of sense of self-worth as parents and then also as a couple, we started noticing there was more tension in our relationship as a couple. So I had the idea to start being very intentional about date nights and date nights is something we've tried to do. I would say we haven't been always a hundred percent consistent with it over the years just depending on the demands of our schedule.

But we've tried to prioritize it on a regular basis, and this was one of those times where we really needed to make it a priority so that we could get outta the house, just the two of us as a couple. And we needed to be intentional about [00:03:00] it. And I, we decided that we were gonna do this every week.

And we even made a rule that when we went out on date night, we weren't allowed to talk about anything going on at home with Ethan and the kind of difficult situation that we were dealing with. And some weeks it was hard to get out the door just 'cause our schedules are busy.

It was hard to carve out that time. But we were intentional about doing it. And by doing that, it actually did make a difference, not just in our relationship as husband and wife, but it also made a difference in how our home felt because we had the opportunity to decompress and get out and then

reconnect as as partners. And then that made us better parents when we came home. And so we found it to be a really effective way to deal with a difficult situation at a time when we were starting to notice that we weren't connecting as spouses. 

Jennifer: Yeah. And I [00:04:00] remember being shocked at how quickly we felt the change. It really didn't take very many dates before we noticed the change in our house. So the mistake I think that parents and we were making at the time is we think we don't have time. We're so tired. The last thing we wanna do is get ready, get dressed up, go on a date, get out the door.

And also sometimes, and we've done this in the past years ago, letting money keep us from going out on those dates. 

Anthony: Yeah. And life is busy and sometimes you look at a calendar and you just don't see time for a date night. And when we were tired, which we were. Tired a lot during that season just because of the emotional exhaustion.

There were times we didn't really wanna get ready and go out. It's easy to take for granted your marriage relationship and forget that's something that also needs to be worked on constantly. You're constantly trying to stay connected and to, if not [00:05:00] improve your relationship, maintain the quality of the relationship that is so precious to you.

Jennifer: Yeah. You need to nurture it. And the consequence of not nurturing it is really feeling disconnected from each other, which actually in its itself brings on a whole list of consequences we could talk about. Now you're not connected, so you're not on the same page, you're just.

Becoming transactional about your relationship and about your family life. Like you do this, I'll do that. And that's about as deep as it goes, 

Anthony: right? 

Jennifer: And we have to remember that we are modeling for our children, our relationships. And one of those consequences is when you get stuck in this cycle of not nurturing your relationship is you're modeling that for your kids.

You're telling your kids that's just how it is. There's no better way. And the truth is there is a better way. 

Anthony: Yeah. So make time to date your spouse. That's the big takeaway from this episode. And there are lots of different ways to do this. We've had at home dates back when I was in law school many years ago, and we didn't have, [00:06:00] we'd have money and we didn't always have babysitters.

Even if we did have money to go out on a date we would put the kids to bed sometimes a little bit early. Jennifer would make dinner and we'd eat a later dinner together, just the two of us while the girls were asleep. We didn't have Ethan yet. And then we'd watch a show or a movie. This was back when Netflix sent DVDs.

In instead of it being all streaming, so we'd get the DVDs in the mail. 

Jennifer: Remember how sad it was when you'd get the DVD and it was scratched? 

Anthony: Yeah. And you could watch 

Jennifer: it. You're like, oh no. 

Anthony: But I, west Wing and 24 were the shows that kind of got us through a lot of that time in, in law school.

But we tried to be intentional at that time about. Doing a date night, even if it was just staying at home and being together, eating a meal together and watching a show together. 

Jennifer: And later as we had a little bit more money, we would go get takeout. But during law school we just didn't. And so I would make something intentionally later for you and I, [00:07:00] so another one of my favorite ways when we go out is when we go out like group dinners, because I feel like this really combines the date aspect and the social aspect, which.

Getting all that into our lives is hard and I'm just such a social person. I love going out with other couples and talking and having a good time. We're still on a date, we're still connecting as a couple. It's adult time, away from the kids, but it's that great time to bring in the social aspect too.

Like Anthony said, at different times in our life we've been able to do different things and when the kids are small it can be really difficult to find a babysitter. So sometimes you have to get creative so you know whether you can afford to hire the neighborhood teen. Or not, or if you can't, actually, that might be the bigger question.

If you can't, what do you do? And there was a time where we did like a babysitting swap with friends. And so at that time, we didn't get a date night every week. We got one every other week, 

Anthony: right? 

Jennifer: Because on one week we watched their kids and on the next week they watched hours. And that became a way that we could regularly get out on a date.

We've also had times where we've lived near relatives, and we've [00:08:00] used grandma and grandpa or. Our aunt or uncle to come and watch or to, for our kids to go play with their cousins for a night so we could get out. So you just have to find a way. 

Anthony: Yeah. The important thing is to not let other things get in the way.

Like this is up there with spending quality time with your kids and connecting with your children on a regular basis. It needs to be that level of. Priority because you're in this together as a couple as parents, and if you're not on the same page and if you're not connecting outside of the context of parenting just connecting in, in terms of your relationship with one another. You're not going to be the parent that you want to be. And so we've had times where we realize we weren't prioritizing this, and then we have to adjust and we work to make that shift. So if you're listening and you realize that you're not prioritizing a relationship with your spouse.

This is a wake up call for [00:09:00] you to prioritize it to fix that part of your family life so that you can not only be happier in your relationship with your spouse, but you can be a better parent. You can be more present at home. You can get rid of tension that might exist. Especially if you're dealing with challenging situations with your kids.

It's just a lot better if you can carve out that time, even if it's just a couple of hours a week, even if it's a stay at home date. Carve out that time to be together as a couple. 

Jennifer: And let your kids see you making that a priority. Let them see the affection between you and your spouse. I think we think it's fun when, our son catches a US kiss for a second and he's Ew, gross.

And so that just makes us wanna do it more. It's fun. When we first became parents, this is another really important conversation I think that we had. Sometimes I look back and realize we had some really important conversations that were actually really wise and we didn't even know how wise they were, and this was that [00:10:00] we realized that our relationship came before the baby, right? Our, the baby was the result of this relationship, and we realized that relationship would remain after she grew up and left the house. And so it, it seemed only logical to us that relationship needed to be prioritized first. And I think a lot of times as parents, we don't, we think we need to prioritize the kids because the kids are only gonna be with us 18 years, and we've gotta get everything into them now.

But the truth is. That our relationship is going to last far beyond that 18 years, and we need to have a good relationship that makes us happy, that fulfills us, that models for our children, what married life can be that goes far beyond those 18 years. And so I'm really grateful, especially now that we're at this place where you know that baby that we had when we were having these, this conversation, her sister, both of them are outta the house and soon their brother will follow. I'm really glad we had that conversation and I'm really glad we [00:11:00] have tried as best as we could to make that be a thing in our marriage. 

Anthony: Yeah, well- said.

Well, If you like this episode today, please leave a rating or review on Apple or Spotify and bonus points if you share this episode with a friend.

Jennifer: Coming up next episode, we are sharing something that every parent wants, but often feels too busy to create. We are sharing three easy ways to create core memories with your family. The kinds of moments your kids will still talk about years from now. These are simple, intentional choices that will create lasting memories for your family.

You won't wanna miss it until next time. Make time to become the parent you want to be.