I'd actually like to point out that staying together with someone you don't like because you are obligated to (due to social norms or religious reasons or whatever) is not only bad for you, it's also bad for your children.
Parental divorce, especially if it happened in mutual agreement, is far better than a having parents constantly fight and being raised in an environment full of micro-aggressions and hostility.
Blaming failed marriages on divorce is blaming the symptoms for the disease. Social acceptance of divorce isn't making married couples fall out, failed relationships are. Pretending everything is fine won't make it so.
(insert obligatory comparison to drug decriminalization here)
Right. I don’t think it’s divorce that does terrible things to children but bad relationships. Whether that relationship ends in divorce or not, growing up in a household full of toxicity and people fighting and hating each other and full of animosity is what is terrible. And yes, that often leads to divorce. But it’s the toxicity that is terrible, not the act itself.
(My parents are not divorced and have had a quite good, tho imperfect, marriage so I can’t speak for either scenario. But this is what I gather knowing and observing people who grew up with parents who divorced or remained married while miserable and hating each other.)
As a child of divorced parents, I'm glad they didn't stay together. For as far back as I can remember, it's been very uncomfortable being around while they're interacting with each other. Most marriages don't end for no reason, and I question the implication that unhappily married parents are necessarily better for a child than happily divorced ones.
I suspect the negative outcomes aren't because "failed marriages are bad", it's because we have stigmatized them to the point that support networks for divorced people in these situations are very poor and lead to negative outcomes.
There's plenty of evidence to show that children raised by married parents who stay together "just for the kids" have a bunch of their own problems because of that. Maybe those problems are less bad, but I'd still suggest that's the case merely because that's the more "socially accepted" thing to do.
I think promoting stable, healthy, long-term relationships is fine, but stigmatizing those who "fail" at that for whatever reason is the root cause of the negative consequences you describe.
> Personally, I think growing up without the freedom leave a bad relationship would be enough on its own to make the environment qualify as unhealthy.
The problem is "bad relationship" is a broad and fuzzy concept, often conveniently left undefined or defined selectively to bolster a particular position.
There are definitely situations where divorce is probably good for the kids (e.g. the more extreme ones, like physical abuse). However there are other perhaps more common situations where divorce is on the whole harmful to the kids (e.g. mom and dad just don't have "that spark" for each other anymore).
Staying together when you hate each other is much worse. Sometimes divorce is just the best out of several bad options.
(BTW, what is bad about teetotaling for a drug dealer? "Don't get high on your own supply" has allegedly been a credo for them since basically forever)
I meant the fact of a divorce involving children sucks (for the kids especially).
I wasn't arguing that parents with children shouldn't divorce at all.
Each couple will need to consider the pros and cons as best they can.
I myself was a product of a home that tried both 'stay together for the kids' and 'extremely messy 6 years long divorce' in that order.
That relationship was doomed from the start, it would have been better if they'd never met.
My dad is/was a high-functioning drug addict (among other thing), divorce was always the best answer for them.
Divorce is also more common for selfish and self-centered people, and I would argue that those traits do not make for good parents. (which is not to say that a good person should remain married to such a spouse --- arguably the only thing worse than a good divorce is a bad marriage)
Ages ago, I worked at a school for boys, and one could pretty much map negative trats of the parents to corresponding unsocial behaviours on the part of the child.
I suspect you've hit the nail on the head of why the social taboo against divorce exists in the first place.
Ceteris paribus, it's better for children if their parents stay together. Therefore we've raised the social cost of a divorce until it's only accessible to people who really need to get out.
Because of cultural changes, this doesn't work as well as it has in the past at keeping couples together. There's good points (fewer people trapped in bad or abusive marriages) and bad points (more families who have to deal with the many practical problems of single parenthood).
I don't understand what divorce has to do with my comment? I was talking about people who don't get along with their own parents and/or with their spouse's parents. Neither has any necessary connection to the topic of divorce. Plenty of people remain married despite the fact that they have a poor relationship with their own parents or with their spouse's parents.
Nobody's saying that it's totally impossible for any given divorce to be worse for the children. What people are saying is that it is possible for a given divorce to be better for the children.
I am a child of divorce. It was a defining moment of my childhood, but with the benefit of years I can conclude that I had better relationships with each of my parents after their divorce than before it. Ironically, my parents also had a better relationship with each other after their divorce, though perhaps this is atypical.
If people want to help children of divorce, then make it so that having divorced parents isn't socially stigmatized, and implement social safety nets to reduce the economic uncertainty that accompanies divorce. But trying to keep parents together by any means necessary--no matter the cost--that doesn't help children, because when they grow up thinking that a toxic relationship is normal that only helps to perpetuate the cycle of marital misery that itself has a damaging effect on the well-being of children.
I would argue against demonizing divorce. Living with a couple who hates each other or where one is domestically abusing the other is a horrible state for children. Marriages aren’t stable inherently.
The problem is that on the surface it sounds like a good thing, but the reality can be very different.
When people would ask me if I was bothered that my parents were not married, my usual answer was "no, because they would certainly have divorced, or my life would have sucked in a major way." I've seen my parents together enough to know that although they were always polite to each other (at least when I was around) that there is no way they would have stayed together.
Likewise, my wife says the opposite: her parents waited many years too long to get divorced and she suffered for it.
As as result when she and I considered getting divorced (in the end, we didn't) the one thing we could agree on is that every step we took had to consider the impact on the children. That doesn't mean staying together "for their sake" but it did mean not dragging them through the mud with us.
Agreed. Also, you're actually hiding the kid from the support they need by staying married. They're not considered a child of divorced parents, yet they might live the worst lives of all. People who live together but don't like each other aren't exactly good parental role models, and they also hog the opportunity for others (go dating!). Staying together means children don't get the support, and parents don't get the support/ suffocate. If this is happening, do you really think your child is currently getting a fair childhood?
>The truth is that it's better for children if parents in a low-conflict marriage to stay together.
My siblings and I are all young adults in our twenties, but we've wanted our parents to divorce for years now. It's a toxic, abusive relationship that's only still existing because of the conservative Roman Catholic culture they were raised in.
I recently broke up with my girlfriend because I thought and still think she's a bad influence on me; I have no desire to hang out with her. I often wonder what happened when I see couples divorce due to "irreconcilable differences" or couples who remain civil or even friends after divorce.
As a child with parents in a high-conflict marriage, I'm not even clear why parents in a low-conflict marriage would want to get divorced.
The idea that divorce can be “healthier” for kids than unhappy parents is self-serving rationalization. Divorce is I’m extremely emotionally and financially disruptive to kids. As an asian married into a white family, the unhappy marriages on my side of the family seem way better for the kids than the unstable relationships on my wife’s side of the family. (But the parents are probably happier divorced/remarried. That’s the trade off.)
An unamicable divorce can certainly be bad, but don't under-estimate how bad it is for a child to grow up in a marriage where both partners hate each other, but can't leave.
Forcing marriage seems like a terrible way to achieve the same thing.
I know there is plenty of evidence that divorce correlates with bad outcomes for kids.
But I don't think there is any rock solid evidence divorce causes that much harm (over living in a house hold with two people that hate each other enough to get divorced).
"Kids do best when the parents are married"
"OK"
"So we must force people to get/stay married for the best outcomes for kids"
"Nope, doesn't follow"
It's a correlation/causation issue, a gap in the logic that some folks seem blind to. Kids may well do best with a stable family life with married parents, I can well believe it. But that' not to stay that forcing people to remain together creates the same circumstances. What they're often proposing may well make things even worse for families that aren't that stable in the first place.
As the child of a family situation where the parents basically agreed to put up with each other and be miserable until the kids were grown up, I feel qualified to say "YMMV" on that one. I certainly did not get an example of a loving, respectful relationship out of the arrangement. I can't say whether it would have been better or worse had they divorced, of course, because I didn't see the alternate universe in which that happened. But I can say it might have been nice if they had been happy, at least some of the time.
Parental divorce, especially if it happened in mutual agreement, is far better than a having parents constantly fight and being raised in an environment full of micro-aggressions and hostility.
Blaming failed marriages on divorce is blaming the symptoms for the disease. Social acceptance of divorce isn't making married couples fall out, failed relationships are. Pretending everything is fine won't make it so.
(insert obligatory comparison to drug decriminalization here)
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