For the past week I’ve been thinking about a conversation I had with a friend, who was asked by an acquaintance how she had managed to raise three such wonderful children.

“We’re home all the time,” she said to her friend.

Usually this response might sound odd, even offensive. But my friend’s husband has been battling cancer for several years. While others in her social circle go out several nights a week — just as she had before her husband’s illness — the couple now are almost always home to prevent unnecessary viruses and infections.

“There really is something to be said for always being around,” my friend told me. “If he hadn’t gotten sick, we would be out all the time. Only now do I know how much I would have missed.”

How many nights out a week are good for a marriage and not detrimental to the kiddies? As more and more evidence confirms the emotional and academic benefits to spending quality time with your children, is it still possible to have a few guilt-free nights a week off the hook? Seeing movies with your spouse? Kicking back a vodka tonic or two with friends?

“It’s harder than ever to leave without feeling pretty guilty,” a mother of three told me. “On weeknights, there’s the homework and bedtime. And on weekends, there’s this gnawing feeling that if you have teenagers at home, the second you go out, your house will become party zcentral.”

“I remember my parents going out a few nights a week,” she continued. “I didn’t give it a second thought, and I don’t think they did either. Today, instead of thinking of how much time we have spent with our children, we calculate the time we haven’t spent with our children.”

Recent studies conducted by sociologists at the University of Maryland and published in a new book, “Changing Rhythms of American Family Life” (Russell Sage Foundation and the American Sociological Association), show that even as American mothers spend longer hours in the office, the total amount of time parents are spending with their children is on the rise.

That’s a pretty nifty feat, and it’s great news for our children. In a study released this September by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA), researchers found that teenagers who have infrequent family dinners (two or fewer per week) are twice as likely to smoke daily and get drunk monthly, compared with teens who have frequent family dinners (at least five per week).

When I first read these reports, I must confess that my first thought was: Can I eat dinner with my children and then go out to dinner with my husband? After reading the studies carefully, I faced up to the fact that dinners at home do not mean 20 minutes around the kitchen table, but rather reference a level of parental engagement that only comes from lingering after dinner, not racing out the door to Buddakan.

The funny thing is, this generation of children may not even realize the sacrifices parents are making to spend an increased amount of time with them. According to a 2003 poll conducted by the Center for a New American Dream, almost one in four 9- to 14-year-olds said their parents were too busy working to spend time with them, and only a third of those polled said they spend a lot of time with their parents.

In an effort to spend more time with our children, parents are spending less time alone with each other. We’re killing ourselves balancing work and family, raising stressed out, entitled children who don’t appreciate the time we spend with them, and to do this, we’re spending less and less time with our spouses.

Does anyone wonder if our obsession with our children is at all linked with the fact that half of the marriages in our country end in divorce?

The researchers can keep publishing papers to demonstrate the importance of parents spending time with their children. But I think we get it. What we haven’t acted on is the research that shows that children from married homes fare better compared with those children raised in divorced families.

More than 1 million children go through their parents’ divorce each year, and they are 50% more likely than their peers from intact families to get divorced themselves. They are also at a greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse, and poor educational performance, and they sometimes suffer the financial setback that most divorced families face.

The fact that parents need to nurture their marriages just as much as they need to nurture their children is a message that needs reinforcing these days. It’s like that boring announcement on the airplane that you probably know by heart: Put on your own oxygen mask before you help your children put on theirs. It might not feel natural, but it’s the safest way to survive turbulence.

sarasberman@aol.com