3 Reasons Why Parents Should Improve Their Sex Life — For Their KIDS

Eleven o'clock at night rolls around and you’re exhausted. If you fell asleep right now, you could get 7 hours of sleep before rolling out of bed and starting it all over again.

Sex? Ha! I don't think so!

That is the last thing on your mind. You only have sex when you’re really horny or when your husband is pleading so much you don’t want to hear it anymore. You’ve got mouths to feed, a house to keep up with, and a job to go to. There are a lot more important things to focus your energy on than sex.

Perhaps you have it totally ass-backward?

Just stop for a second. Stop the all the busy-ness and the "to-dos". Go somewhere quiet right now, by yourself, lock the door, turn off the phone, the TV, the radio, and take a big deep breath.

This is your life we’re talking about here. Are you telling me you’re willing to go through the rest of your life denying yourself one of life’s simplest freedoms? Are you telling me you’re willing to continue to model chaos and sacrifice for your kids instead of joy and ease?

Because when you are not focusing on improving your sex life, you’re having a more profound effect on your and your children’s lives than you realize.

I used to tell myself sex wasn’t a big deal. I had a great life, there were a lot of people who had it worse off than me (like that’s a good excuse) and besides, I was really busy raising a family.

My most important priority was being a good mom. I didn’t realize the impact my perspective was having on my whole life…until, one day, I got my mojo back.

My husband used to ask me to have more sex. But I just didn’t want to. He seemed to want it all the time and was resentful of the fact that I was the ultimate "gatekeeper" to his fulfillment. The last thing I wanted to think about was working on my sex life because I didn’t even want to have more of it.

Why on earth would I work on it? I just wanted him to stop bugging me. What I truly wanted was for him to pay more attention to the house, help me with the chores, and spend more time actually paying attention to the kids.

Boy, did I have my priorities mixed up.

There are 3 compelling reasons why all parents should focus on improving their sex life. And it’s not just because sex is important for your health or some lame excuse that is super unmotivating.

These reasons tug at the heartstrings so deep that women are going to need to reevaluate their priorities. And it’s about time because this world needs us to get our acts together now more than ever before.

Here are 3 reasons why parents need to improve their sex life, especially after kids are involved:

1. You are setting your children up for having crappy sex lives too.

As a coach, I hear all the time that people, especially women, are deeply concerned about screwing up their kids. Whether you come from an abusive background as many of my clients did or your growing up years were "normal", your sex life could probably use a face-lift.

I’ve never met anyone whose parents had a thriving, healthy sexual relationship. How often did you witness your parents in an embrace as a kid?

Were they playful with each other in the kitchen and living room? Did they gaze into each other’s eyes? Did your mother dress up for your father? Did your father speak lovingly about how beautiful and wonderful your mother was and treat her like a queen?

Most people answer a hardy, "Ha! No!" to those questions. And so what they end up doing is everything they possibly can to take care of and love their children like they wished they themselves were loved as a child.

In that incredibly caring and generous gesture, we actually teach our kids the opposite of what we are going for and we don’t even realize it. 

We teach our children by what we do, not by what we say. What I mean is, if you take exquisite care of yourself, you teach your children to take exquisite care of themselves. If you do things that make you happy, you teach your children to do things that make themselves happy.

If you treat your children with exquisite care at the expense of yourself, you teach them how to take care of others and ignore their own needs. If you place your children’s happiness over your own, you teach them to ignore their own happiness in order to make others happy.

Putting our children above ourselves as a daily practice is totally screwed up, and we don’t realize we’re doing it because we love them so much. And it’s not your fault if you’re doing this. It’s not even your parents’ or their parents’ fault. It’s no one’s fault. It’s just the way that our neurophysiology is wired! That’s right! It’s just the way the brain works.

Part of our brain wants us to have the most amazing life we could ever possibly dream of and another part of our brain wants us to keep on repeating all of the patterns we learned from our parents and society while we were growing up. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed or confused in your life, now you may have a little more understanding of why.

That battle is going on in your head everyday between your best life and the life you were taught to live. But working on improving your sex life can short circuit these dysfunctional patterns and help you turn this ship around.

If you’re not working on improving your sex life, you’re heading for an iceberg and you’re taking your kids along with you.

2. You’re not helping to conserve the world’s resources.

As a society, we’ve been focused on trying to save the planet for a long time. But somehow we continue to get into deeper and deeper trouble no matter how many hours we spend advocating for composting, clean cars and food, and climate change.

Now all of these things are important to continue in our own houses of course, but how are we going to inspire our neighbors, our kids, and our community to take up these practices? Are they going to want to do it because they see how crazy it makes us putt one more thing on our "to-do" list?

No. People like convenience. The irony is that people love to try to conserve their resources, just like we are trying to get them to do for the planet. But the way that people go about trying to conserve their resources is by making their lives more convenient because their lives are so damn busy.

Paper plates and bigger cars help us do all the things we need to do in a day. Longer showers help us to cope with everyday stress. If we were having great, loving sex, everyone would be a lot happier and less stressed. Besides, we would be learning how to responsibly conserving our most valuable resources, time, and energy.

How much energy do you have? Do you have a lot of energy that is infectious and inspiring? How often do you prioritize your own pleasure, intimacy, and love in your life by putting "intimacy time" on your calendar? It’s not that sex is just going to fix everything, it’s working on your intimate relationship that will.

What you learn when you work on improving your intimacy and sex life teaches you the most valuable lessons in life. It’s the lessons that allow you to actually become the change you wish to see in the world — loving, compassionate, understanding and honest.

These are the quality of a person who knows how to conserve their resources, use everything so nothing is wasted, care for all things and be personally responsible. We need to change the inside (us) if the outside (the world) will ever change for the better.

3. You are being a role model for struggle and pain.

As a parent, you are a role model for your children, for your parents, for other parents, for other kids, and for your community. That’s a function of being a parent. The question is, "What kind of role model do you want to be?"

Most people never even consider this question, so congratulate yourself because you are light years above most people just for reading this and thinking about it yourself. When we decided to become parents we put into action a magic chain of events that probably happened well below your level of awareness.

I remember when my first child was born, it was like a switch went off inside of me that affected the way I thought about everything because I loved her so much and now I was a parent, so I was responsible for her, not just myself.

As parents, we "decide" even if it’s below our level of conscious awareness, to carry on the bloodline. And in that decision, we also agree to carry on the patterns of our ancestors. All of those things that we knew our parents did that bug us? We carry those on.

All those things that we never understood that our parents did and why they did them? We carry on too. We become, by having children, the carriers of the bloodlines behavioral, thought, and emotional patterns.

Yes, that happens just because we are alive, but when we become parents, we have agreed to continue the chain and so it’s like turning up the volume on the potential dysfunction that gets carried out into the world.

We are role models as parents and we need to decide what kind of role models we want to be — empowered or disempowered.

If you want to role model things like we mentioned above, love, compassion, honesty, integrity, understanding, and forgiveness, the most efficient way to do that is to be able to have very high-quality intimate relationships.

In fact, a lot of people are motivated by not wanting to carry on the dysfunction of their family history so much that they think they are making behavioral choices that go against what they learned, when in fact, they are continuing to operate and propagate the same dysfunctional patterns.

Working on your intimate relationship gets to the heart of the matter, the core of the issues and tackles them so that you can become the role model you want to be. But if you avoid your intimate life, or believe it’s not important, you will continue to role model the opposite of what you actually want.

There is either love or there is not love; understanding or non-understanding.

When you work on your intimate relationship, you work on and toward everything beautiful in life. And you break up dysfunctional patterns.

Sexual and intimate relationships might not seem like a big deal when you've got a family to take care of. But life is full of paradoxes and this is one of them. The personal development work that we choose to do in our intimate life changes who we are at a fundamental level.

It changes everything so that we can become the people we really want to be and the change we really want to see in the world. We become the parents we want to be, the community members and the world citizens that make a difference.

Make a difference in your own life right now and decide to work on your intimate relationship, even if it’s just you at first because your partner isn't interested. Sex really is that important. Do it for your kids. Do it for your community. It’s worth it for everyone. Do it for yourself.

Ani Anderson is a master coach, speaker, business mentor, and author. When you are ready to make intimacy a priority, visit Practical Alchemist. You will learn to find out who YOU are by finding your "Soul's Agenda" so that you can share yourself with others in a meaningful way. 

Watch YourTango Experts discuss why passion dies after a couple become parents and how you can fix it.