The Secret of Happy Parents: How to Stay in Love as a Couple and True to Yourself. Steve Biddulph

       1 About Us, About You

      About Us

      A book is really just someone talking: a very one-sided conversation. Since we are about to ‘bend your ear’ for a couple of hundred pages, you might well be wondering who we – the authors – are, and what we are like. So let’s get the embarrassing part out of the way!

      We are very ordinary. Our house is never tidy, we laugh a lot, have been known to shout at the kids, we have fights with each other and lose the keys to the car. Aged in our late forties, we are getting old and funny-looking, and to the horror of our offspring, we don’t really care! We have lived together for twenty-five years and been married for the last sixteen of those. Our kids are fifteen and eight – a boy and a girl.

      Steve grew up in a caring, but very emotionally constrained and rather isolated migrant family. (You guessed it – he’s English!) Shaaron is of Irish-German descent. She was born on the canefields of north Queensland, one of five little girls who, with their parents, had to struggle and work very hard to get by.

      We were blue-collar kids who were lucky to grow up in the sixties when you could get an education, and advance in the world beyond the horizons of your parents. After a fairly bumpy adolescence, Steve trained as a counselling psychologist. Shaaron trained as a nurse and then a social worker. Looking back, the training was of limited value but we made some good friends, and it gave us something to do while we were growing up.

      Steve specialized in families and children. Shaaron worked with deaf people, and before that, as a very young nurse, had to tackle the deep water of illness, death and bereavement.

      Being thrown in the deep end at a young age turned out to be a plus. Unsure of ourselves but eager to do great deeds, we found that our patients appreciated our honesty in admitting that we didn’t know much. Not having much else to offer, we learned by listening very closely to people and looking carefully at every movement and expression, really wanting to understand life through those we were supposed to be helping.

      By getting this close to our clients, we began to know and like them, often more than they liked themselves. Sometimes this approach of listening was helpful to the people we worked with. At other times, looking back, we were quite useless. But we never met anyone with whom we didn’t eventually feel some sense of a bond. This included ‘ordinary’ people, who were easy to like, but also people who were violent or criminal, even people who had killed others.

      Counselling work is very absorbing. But after a few years we began to wonder if something was going wrong with family life in the late twentieth century. We were meeting hundreds of parents every year who had almost identical problems with their children. And hundreds of reasonable, caring couples who were struggling to keep their marriages alive. And this was just in one medium-sized country town (Launceston, Australia, pop. 62 000). Sometimes after a hard day’s work, you felt like calling a public meeting and saying: ‘What’s going on, guys?’ Or to put the question another way: ‘Why is family life so hard?’

      Does normal mean ‘screwed up’?

      To answer this question, for ourselves, as well as our clients, we read widely and also began travelling and talking to people in different countries. All through the 1970s and 1980s we travelled to observe childhood and family life, spending time in Calcutta in India, in remote villages in Papua New Guinea, and in modern cities like Singapore, San Francisco, Auckland and Beijing.

      When we observed the lives of babies in the slums of Calcutta or in the bush of remote New Britain in the Pacific, we were struck by how contented and happy these babies and their parents often seemed. When we noted the lives of parents and children in childcare centres, schools, or suburban backyards in Australia and the US, we were equally struck by how unhappy they often were. The conclusion was alarming: as society got more materially privileged, childhood actually seemed to get worse, and the experience of parenthood somehow seemed harder.

      In the West people had cars, health care, good housing and appliances. Our children did not die of preventable diseases and they got good educations. Yet we were time-poor, isolated, lonely and in competition instead of co-operation with those around us. We had traded our emotional wellbeing for material wellbeing and as a result the average Western family was in poor emotional health. In fact, it was dying of stress.

      The question that arose was obvious: was it possible to have a materially good life AND live in the more joy-filled and connected way of people in more traditional societies?

      In 1984 Steve wrote a book called The Secret of Happy Children, which espoused a more loving and positive style of parenting, at a time when books were more concerned with ‘taming’ children (or in other words, getting them to fit in with adults’ crazy lives). Quietly and without fanfare, Secret became popular all over the world.

      The original edition of this book was our second one. Writing it together took many arguments and discussions, and so took a long time! By 1998 we had seven books, published in fifteen languages, in almost two million homes.

      These days we are older and with our own children half-raised, we are starting to relax a little and not feel like we are solely responsible for saving the world. We feel ourselves to be a small part of a large social shift – parents gaining in their sense of worth, men reclaiming their place in the family, childhood becoming less oppressive and more secure.