By Dr. Kalman Heller, Child and Family Psychologist
Why This Column Talks About Marriage
I like to remind readers now and then why a parenting column spends so much time on marriage. It’s because no single factor has a bigger impact on the health of every member of a family. Parents locked in ongoing marital conflict expose their kids to chronic tension, sometimes an outright abusive environment, constant sabotage of each other’s parenting, and direct involvement of the children in the fighting itself. Research consistently shows that both children and parents develop real emotional and physical symptoms living inside that kind of toxic family dynamic, and the research on parental conflict and children’s mental health keeps confirming it. How divorce affects children long term is really the question.
Rethinking “It’s Not So Bad”
If marital conflict ends in divorce, the scars often run deeper still. Yes, there are marriages where divorce truly is the only way to stop the fighting. And plenty of books drawing on studies of post-divorce families have tried to paint a picture where kids come out mostly fine. My experience says it’s at least as hard as people think, and often harder. The “positive outcomes” research tends to describe situations where the parents kept cooperating after the split. So how many genuinely amicable divorces do you actually know of? We’re also still learning about the long-term effects of growing up in a divorced household, especially on someone’s ability to trust the vows of marriage later on. One thing worth updating here, the divorce rate itself has actually fallen a lot since it peaked around 1980, back down to roughly where it stood in the 1970s. That’s real progress at the population level. But it’s cold comfort to any individual family living through one, and it doesn’t erase how many adults today still carry a childhood shaped by their parents splitting up.
The Reunion Fantasy Never Fully Goes Away
Kids tend to never fully let go of the wish that their parents will get back together. That was brought home vividly by a 27 year old patient of mine whose parents had divorced when she was six. Both parents had remarried years earlier, and she genuinely liked her stepparents and their families. Yet when one parent’s second marriage hit a rough patch, her first reaction was to imagine a second divorce, followed by a second divorce for her other parent, followed by her original parents finally remarrying each other.
The Pain Doesn’t Fully Disappear, Even for Adult Children
Adult children of divorce often manage to escape the day-to-day tension and the shuffling between houses, some even by moving far away, but they still feel real pain around holidays and big life events. They keep having to figure out how to divide their time between expanded families who sometimes still carry real anger toward each other. In most families, that pain never fully disappears. Try planning a wedding with four sets of parents. Try deciding which of four households to visit on a given holiday, or which of four sets of grandparents watches the kids when you’re away for a weekend.
Explaining Divorce to a Four Year Old
At the other end of the age spectrum, it’s genuinely painful to watch parents of very young children try to explain a divorce. A four year old can’t fully grasp the concept of marriage or adult love, so how is she supposed to understand divorce, or the idea that her parents don’t love each other anymore? Can she really absorb her parents’ well-intentioned reassurance that Mommy and Daddy will always love her? It’s solid adult logic aimed at a child who doesn’t yet have the concepts to fully process it, and it’s fair to wonder whether that reassurance actually leaves her feeling secure, or still quietly afraid of being left.
Invest in Your Marriage Like You Invest in Your Kids
Plenty of explanations have been offered elsewhere for the sharp rise in divorce rates that took hold decades ago, and the numbers have actually been trending down since, largely tracking demographic shifts in who marries and when. Whatever got us here, though, marriage still isn’t treated as a priority in most families. Everything else tends to come first. The fading role of shared ritual, spirituality, and community hasn’t helped either, since those used to be some of the structures that kept a marriage vigorous almost by default. Don’t kid yourself. Today’s couples are focused hard on balancing work and parenting, and there’s an unspoken assumption that the marriage will just survive underneath all of it. It won’t, not unless you make real time for it and treat a strong marriage as a skill you build, the same way good parenting itself takes real, ongoing effort. Problems with communication, conflict resolution, and adapting to changing roles at home can often be prevented or resolved through workshops, books, or therapy. Failing to make every real effort to help your marriage work, even when it looks like it’s failing, is a serious mistake. To save a marriage is, in a very real sense, to save a family.
