Young happy parents and a wonderful baby. Such a touching photo is in most family albums, and I really want to say: “Stop, just a moment, you are beautiful!” However, no one will undertake to claim that the life of a family will consist only of such moments. Difficulties are inevitable - this is a normal phenomenon, but what is fundamentally different is: by what rules does the family function during a period of increased emotional stress? The marital union consists of subsystems - marital and parental. Scientifically speaking, the marital subsystem includes “only transaction patterns associated with showing attention to each other, but not to children” (Brown and Christensen, 2001). And the parent subsystem owns the parent roles. The presence of role distribution is the key to the successful functioning of the family as a whole, therefore subsystems must firmly guard their sovereignty. Alas, this is a very difficult task, and a huge number of young families do not even undertake to solve it. In most cases, they do not even realize what dangers await their family if all the main meanings of marriage focus exclusively on responsibility for children. If the imbalance that damages marital intimacy is too great, the marriage will crack. Very few couples in our culture know the answer to the question of how to remain spouses after becoming parents and not crowd out from the relationship those beautiful impulses that originate in wedding vows about love and fidelity. The marital subsystem is the foundation of the entire family. For children, she is a model of the relationship between a man and a woman, which manifests itself in all the little things of everyday life. The child unconsciously watches how a woman-mother meets a man-father in the evening, how a man-father congratulates a woman-mother on her birthday, how they spend their vacation, how they quarrel and make peace, how they express love and affection, and many, many other “hows” . All children's observations become part of his values ​​and expectations when he comes into contact with the outside world (Minukhin, Fishman, 1998). The parental subsystem has other functions and meanings. Her goals include bearing, raising and caring for children. Parents make decisions, establish rules of interaction, and determine the child's role in the functioning of the family as a whole. And here it is very important not to lose the sense of adequacy. A child is happy when he is desired and loved, but not when he is the navel of the earth! Overprotection kills his independent personality and slows down his development. The marital component should not dissolve in the abyss of parental self-denial “in the name of the child,” so that the same child does not later become a witness and victim of the divorce proceedings of mom and dad. Our time is characterized by the cult of the child, which places very high demands on parents: both in terms of comfort of life the younger generation, and education, and recreation. The appearance of a baby, often the only one, is given great importance, and against this background the birth rate is falling. During the childbearing period, young people are more concerned with their career and financial security than with reproduction. Nowadays you rarely see seven people working in shops and all from one husband, as happened with great-grandmothers. With the current freedom of sexual relations, the factor of having a child is sometimes the only motive for entering into legal marriage. And in this case we are dealing with the worst-case scenario for the development of family life. If people “got married because they both wanted a child,” then the marital threads are unlikely to retain their brightness and strength for long. Therefore, it is important for all young couples preparing to create their own family union and become parents to remember the truth of the famous aphorism: the best thing you can do for the happiness of your children is to love each other.