This article is extracted from “This is NOT a Second Honeymoon: Helping Couples Survive Spending A Lot of Time Together”, a book that was written by Christopher L. Smith to help couples during the COVID-19 pandemic. In his clinical work, he realized that couples being quarantined together have particular challenges. The book goes into a lot of these challenges along with strategies to survive these types of times and even to have their relationship thrive. We will be sharing a series of these extracts over several weeks to help you. If you would like to look at all of them together and get the book right away, it can be found on Amazon (Book).

The roles that each of you had around the kid either may not work anymore or may not make sense, given that all of you are having to stay at home. Any transitions you do have to be carefully done so as not to confuse the kids. However, it is important that you work out with your partner what roles each of you will have during this time.

For each thing that you are looking at working with the kids on, there are three choices: you will do it, your partner will do it, or both of you will do it. This is another area where there is not a universally right answer, and while there are situations in which there is a right answer for your case, there are many cases where you just have to work it out. If you fail to decide between the choices, you are leaving things open for the kids to take advantage of as well as to cause bad feelings between you and your partner. Here’s the Book.