He meant the night the kids left and he chose not to follow them

I don't think so he seems to be conservative about sex and not wanting to have it if it's not necessary

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I was under the impression that the mom had done things to her/with her. "She kept repeating, "In the darkyou touch me, I touch you", and eventually flipped out over guilt. just theory, though.
I agree completely. The dad did too many things that just don't fit with the scenario that he was the molester, and in fact, I think the director pretty much was telegraphing through the entire film that the mom was the culprit, but for whatever reason may not have had any recollection of what she had done. She's the one that on a number of occasions had lied or given incomplete information to the police. And her husband is the one who offered more, correcting his wife. Not exactly the kind of behavior he'd have been displaying if the secret he was hiding was his own.
The husband may have been hiding a secret, but that secret was his wife's molestation of the children, the molestation of his daughter that he found out about after her running away the first time and when the affair with the teacher was discovered, and perhaps a continued molestation, or a shifting to the son, after they moved to the new town to start a new life and get away from what may have been an unspoken secret but common knowledge in their old residence.
On the surface, without thinking too deeply, it does look like the husband might be the culprit, especially based on societal prejudices about how molestation is something that women just don't do. But when you examine each scene with the husband, his actions, his reactions, his conversations, not just with his wife but with others, and then examine the same with the wife, especially that conversation with the old indigenous woman the picture becomes more clear.
I suspect that the director was possibly even trying to make a point about a societal tendency to always look at the father as the likely culprit when there are signs that molestation have occurred. They even went to the point of showing the mother as a sexual predator herself, something the father didn't display with anyone, rubbing our nosing right in it, and still, based on some of the posts in on this board, some people still want to see her as some sort of victim because of her totally abhorrent and frankly criminal behavior.
As I wrote in another thread, take each of those scenes displaying the mother's unconscionable behavior and insert the father into those scenarios. Picture the father forcing himself on a fairly young girl. Picture the father forcing himself on a female police officer investigating the case. Remember, there was absolutely no consent given in either of these scenes, and the mother did not break off immediately even when both the young man and the police officer gave strong cues that her attacks were not welcome. Even picture the husband taking his wife the way she took him sexually.
I suspect that every single view of this film would take these incidents as proof-positive that the father was a sick man completely capable of molesting his children. But because it's the mother, the audience doesn't connect the dots in that obvious way, instead excusing the mother's behavior and chalking it up to sexual repression and the fault of a husband not fulfilling her needs. The double-standard would be almost laughable if it wasn't so disturbing in how it shines a light on the gender prejudices of what seems like the average viewer. And as I wrote, I suspect this was the entire point of the film, and what the director was subtly trying to point out.

Yeah that's what I got from it too, the scene with the mom in the desert and the nude scene in the town, is her breaking down mentally because she can't come to terms with what she has done, and that, ultimately, she is the cause for her own daughters disappearance.

I was under the impression that the mom had done things to her/with her. "She kept repeating, "In the darkyou touch me, I touch you", and eventually flipped out over guilt. just theory, though.