As soon as your children are able to crawl, you child-proof your home. You child-proof your car. You child-proof your yard. But child-proofing a marriage?

Like the latches, gates and locks designed to keep tots out of harm’s way, every marriage needs its own rituals and techniques to keep offspring from sabotaging intimacy and romance.

What Happy Parents Do: The Loving Little Rituals of a Child-Proof Marriage offers bite-sized anecdotes from married couples who’ve preserved the passion and intimacy of marriage despite the strains of raising children.

Authors Carol J. Bruess, Ph.D. & Anna D.H. Kudak, M.A., have obviously done their homework. Happily married themselves, the college professors drew on interviews with hundreds of parents and more than 15 years of research.

Everyone knows that the demands of parenting are enough to dampen marital bliss in the child-centric family culture of 21st-century America. What not enough couples know is how to keep the original “two-pack” intact.

But rather than coming off as a laundry list of chores to add to an already booked life, Bruess and Hudak take 50 real-life examples and then explain why they work.

Nothing in the book offers a last-ditch solution to save a dying marriage. Instead, readers may notice rituals throughout the book similar to special things they do in their everyday lives. “What Happy Parents Do” keeps married couples from taking those special routines for granted and encourages husband and wife to nurture what led them to fall in love in the first place.

For me, this quick, bedside-table book made me take a closer look at the rituals my husband and I had established in our still somewhat-new marriage. Some of the book’s examples seemed goofy at first read. Then I realized that the corny, private stuff sometimes too embarrassing to share is what keeps couples connected – and children out – through the course of a healthy, happy marriage.