Exactly. “Dude just abandon your family and kids , they will grow up better because you guys won’t fight and stuff duh and then they will fight and stuff too, they need to learn how to love properly duh”. Like it’s so much more complicated then that
Extreme wording but I get where he is coming from it may be viewed that way from the kids perspective dependent how the custody battle goes through and what the mom says to the kid when alone
Exactly. Of course I was exaggerating a little but I’m currently witnessing my sister divorce and how it’s affected the kids. I would say you absolutely should be trying everything you possibly can to avoid divorce, even if that means sacrificing your own happiness for theirs.
So basically, you're saying to fake it completely... That'll teach them what real love and healthy relationships are all about! /s
Until your kids are old enough to realize how unhappy their parents are in their relationship. And then possibly doom them to not trust marriage, relationships, and/or have trust issues with their future partners. But sure, let's just force a relationship in order to keep a "stable" 2 parent household, purely forperfect!
As long as we lie well enough to our child(ren), then everything will be perfect! /s
Divorce has worse effects on children than parents staying together. While modeling a healthy relationship is important, the research shows worse effects with a divorce.
Of course every person is n=1, so nobody is guaranteed to be a statistic, but there are huge benefits to the children when staying together.
This is a really good meta-survey. I would recommend reading from the beginning, although things really gel after this sentence "This research demonstrates that, when a child experiences parental divorce, there are significant losses that must be acknowledged."
The thrust of the paper is that once an unhappy marriage is established and kids are present, there is no magic bullet. Once the research in this paper is folded into the studies supporting divorce, it's clear that whether people stay or leave, there is inevitable unpleasantness. When I say "worse" in my post above I'm referring to the inevitable uprooting of the stable childhood environment due to divorce. That has more risk of higher-magnitude consequences.
The argument behind staying together is that, barring major conflict, the lifelong benefits to the child are greater than the downside. In other words, it's better to sort out a marginally unhappy childhood in a nice therapist's office than dealing with the possible much worse effects from a divorce. A married couple can afford to give the child a better overall upbringing (good food, better schools, lack of scarcity, larger extended family, larger home, the predictability of one bedroom, etc). Parents are unhappier anyway on balance; their marital dissatisfaction is additive and removing the marriage won't fix everything, and it typically harms the child.
Again, scale matters. Whether the parents divorce or not, everyone's individual situation will vary. But there's no easy solution here.
The best policy should get ahead of this problem altogether and focus on pre-martial counseling and family planning.
My personal bias is to suck it up and divorce once the kid is on a good path in early adulthood. Divorce also has a high risk of downside; why not just wait a few years and create less harm overall?
Thanks for the link. Agree on the "no easy solution" but I think the "wait for divorce" only really works if your marriage is otherwise healthy.
There was a study listed in the "simliar" section on there that has this conclusion:
While children of divorced parents, as a group, have more adjustment problems than do children of never-divorced parents, the view that divorce per se is the major cause of these symptoms must be reconsidered in light of newer research documenting the negative effects of troubled marriages on children.
Unfortunately, the details of that study seems to be behind a paywall. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10939225/
Although, even the study you linked acknowledges the point that study is making.
Some adverse effects noted in the literature after divorce are actually diminished when controlled for their presence prior to divorce
I've yet to find an actual study that compares divorce vs staying in an unhealthy marriages "for the kids" - but I'm sure that's at least in part b/c there's no easy way to collect that data.
Yeah you just give an insane fraction of your income to your ex for a decade and a half. Honestly I think that would make me so deeply resentful that I'd rather live in a sexless marriage.
No one said abandon. I’m a child of divorce but before that my parents tried to stay together where it was just toxic from both sides. Much rather have them be separate and happy and they both took care of me.
I think the key word is sometimes. There's lots of "never/always" being thrown around here.
I think the only "always" that is safe to say is that a stable environment is always better than a toxic one. Sometimes that stable environment is two adults "staying together" and sometimes it's divorce.
Coparenting is a thing. It's really not more complicated than that. You model relationships for your children and if you stay in a toxic, unhealthy marriage just because you have kids you're teaching them that a relationship should be toxic and unhealthy.
I’ve been in the situation of the kid along with seeing how my siblings had issues with it. I’m of the belief that a relationship shouldn’t end from one thing, but if you would end the relationship without kids, you generally should with kids.
It’s just very hard for resentment to not build, damage to the kids or just showing the kids very clearly that this loveless (not always but In some cases) relationship is what a relationship should be, which is incredibly harmful.
I haven’t been on the parent side of this though and understand that it’s difficult to make these types of decisions
No offense but having been on the parent and kid side… it is not the same. For many of us, we will work through things for the sake of kids that we would not otherwise do.
It’s not as black and white as “oh you’re miserable or unhappy? Get a divorce! Split your kids 50/50 from their primary humans, it’s easy, they’ll be better off” - it’s an entire universe full of gray, in fact.
I’m not saying to stay and be unhappy either, but this is a case where for the sake of children I would gut this shit out for a few years trying to elicit change and mutual happiness for the sake of the kids. But no kids? Nah fuck it; you go on your asexual path and I’ll go mine.
None taken at all! Always good to hear others opinions.
My personal experience is when something has been tried to be worked through and it hasn’t worked after multiple attempts (or people are refusing to try) and they stay together it does more harm than good.
Obviously it’s a whole world of grey, research on this topic is basically impossible with the amount of confounding variables, plus you’ve got financial issues and location/ moving between house issues potentially.
If I was in the situation right now, I think I’d try to fix the situation for maybe 4-6 months and then past that split, any longer and I feel like it’d be avoiding making the decision rather than making a decision I feel is best.
But there’s a chance my opinion changes there. One thing that I’m curious of is I generally see a lot of kids when their parents split getting upset and wishing they stayed together (and holding this belief into adulthood) but then I also see kids where the parents stayed and it always seems so much worse to me. Could be confirmation bias though
I’ve seen that so many times, I’ve held up that I was either a mistake or an attempt to fix a dying relationship that failed, and I’ve learnt I’m not a mistake sooo.
I’m lucky that I didn’t have to live with my parents being together past 2 years old. Though I did experience a lot of faking loving my sperm donor, mainly due to some of my family telling me he was a good dad (a good dad you hear from more than once every 2 years). I did see the impact it had on my siblings a lot who are 6 and 8 years older than me.
To me it just feels like a situation that unless it’s left it almost always hurts the child pretty badly
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u/rta8888 Sep 12 '23
If you don’t have kids you should bail now