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Well, some of the wisest parenting advice I ever received wasn't even about parenting.

Someone once told me that the best thing you can do for your kids is to love your spouse and strengthen your marriage.

I'm John Fuller along with Danny

Werta who heads up our parenting and youth department here at Focus on the

family and Danny it's so often our culture is centered on the child. The family is child-centric, if I can put it that way.

The focus is making sure that my child succeeds and that my child is taken care of.

But there's something not healthy about that

perspective. That's so true John I remember early on in my marriage we had a

coach I went on a basketball trip and it was in college and the coach said,

I learned early in my marriage that I needed to find one thing to do each day for my spouse to make the day a better day for

my spouse.

And I learned that along the way, especially once I had kids.

My wife has said a few times along our marriage, she said, hey you're paying more attention to the kids than me.

Your marriage can suffer and if the marriage suffers, your home suffers.

You don't have the energy, the ability to pay attention to what is going

on in your kids' lives in a good and healthy balanced way. You begin to try to satisfy your own emotional emptiness through your kids.

It puts too much pressure on that.

They become your best friend instead of your spouse.

And it becomes unbalanced.

And maybe it works for some people along the way and it looks good and

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