Should We Stay Together for the Kids?
It’s a common approach to a broken marriage: I’ll just stay until the kids are older. Until the youngest graduates from high school/college. Until they start their careers.
This line of thinking almost always comes from a place of love. Parents in an unhappy marriages try to protect their children. And the deep sacrifice is real.
But does it work? And at what cost to the children, and to you?
What Does the Research Show?
For decades now, the societal opinion was simple and clear: children are better off with intact families. And the research data on divorce and its effects on children seemed to confirm it.
However, recently more nuanced research has challenged that presumption. What it shows is that what matters the most for a child’s wellbeing is not whether their parents are married or divorced. What matters the most is the level of conflict they are exposed to.
Studies consistently confirm that children raised in high-conflict marriages have worse academic, emotional, and social outcomes than children whose parents divorce and are able to sustain a low-conflict co-parenting relationship.
The protective factor is not the marriage. It’s the peace.
This finding has had profound implications for people evaluating the choice to “stay for the kids” that we’ll explore below.
What Do Children Experience During a Marriage?
Children are remarkably perceptive and highly sensitive to their environment. They can register the tension in a room before they even have words for it. They notice when parents don’t touch, don’t look at each other, don’t share laughter together.
They absorb their home’s emotional climate in ways that form their evolving comprehension of what love and partnership look like.
What children learn by watching their parents’ marriage, whether it’s broken or healthy, becomes their baseline template. Research on patterns in intergenerational relationships consistently shows that children who grow up with parents in emotionally cold or high-conflict marriages are more likely to model those behaviors when they become adults and enter into their own relationships.
You are teaching your children what marriage is. Is your marriage the kind of marriage you wish for them? That is worth sitting with for a minute.
What are Adults’ Hidden Costs?
The toll of staying in a broken marriage goes beyond the emotional, even though that cost is deep and real. The physical and mental effects of chronic ongoing stress, depression, perpetual heightened anxiety, and a gradual erosion of self-worth are common among people who choose to stay in an unfulfilling partnership over a lengthy period.
There are also very practical financial costs. Over the course of a marriage, you and your spouse become more and more financially entangled. Assets accumulate, decisions are made (separately or jointly), and patterns are entrenched over years of a dysfunctional marriage, which can create an increasingly more complex legal puzzle.
Last but not least is the loss of precious time. You cannot recover the lost months and years spent in a broken marriage that has, in effect, already ended. Those are months and years not available to you for rebuilding, for healing, or for designing and living a fulfilling life that fits you and your dreams.
When Does Staying Makes Sense? And When Doesn’t it?
Clearly there are circumstances in which staying, even if only temporarily, is genuinely the right choice.
If your marriage has real potential to be mended, and if both of you are willing to seriously engage in couples therapy and to do the work of rebuilding, then your marriage and your children’s stability may benefit from that effort.
The critical distinction you must make is: Are you staying to truly work your marriage or staying just to avoid a divorce. The first is an intentional and honest act of commitment. The second is avoidance, and this is when your children will bear the detrimental weight of what you’re avoiding.
If you have genuinely tried therapy, had the honest conversations, and put in sustained effort to mend your marriage and it has not improved, staying for the kids may not be protecting from what you think it is. It may actually be doing the opposite.
What Does a Thoughtful Transition Look Like?
If you have made the decision to divorce (or are seriously considering it), the most protective and loving thing you and your spouse can do for your children is to work together to separate well.
What does that mean?
- Avoid conflict. Children’s outcomes are most strongly predicted by the level of conflict they witness between their parents. A collaborative or cooperative divorce is much better for your children (and you) than either a high-conflict marriage or a high-conflict divorce.
- A loving and consistent presence from you and your spouse. The stability of the parental relationship with both parents matters more than stability of the physical household. Children whose parents foster secure attachments with the children through and after the divorce fare profoundly better than children who’ve lost meaningful connection with one or both parents.
- Age-appropriate honesty. Your children deserve to have an understanding through language they can process about the changes going on around them. They should not be manipulated, used as pawns, put in the middle, forced to choose one parent over the other, or made to carry your own emotional burdens. They just need to know that are and will continue to be loved and have safe homes.
- A co-parenting relationship built on what’s best for your children. How you and your spouse speak about and to each other, coordinate around the children’s needs, and both show up in your child’s life will shape your children’s perception of you and your spouse, their own childhood, and their future relationships, for years to come.
A thoughtful, low-conflict divorce, supported by a good, like-minded attorney, and often a trusted therapist who specializes in family transitions, can give your children more stability (in all the ways that matter) than a continued but unhappy marriage.
Are You Still Deciding?
You may find yourself in the middle of this decision. If you are juggling attempts to weigh your children’s wellbeing against your own to make the “right” choice, we want to offer this to you:
Your wellbeing matters too, and not just for your own sake. Your children need a fulfilled parent who is present and emotionally available to them and is able to help them thrive. An emotionally/mentally/physically exhausted, depressed, disconnected, angry, sad parent is not more beneficial to children just because they live in the same house.
There is no magic formula for this important, life-altering decision. But there is legal, therapeutic, and practical support waiting for you whatever you decide. You don’t have to figure it out alone.
At Hargrave Family Law, we work with parents who are in the process of navigating what will be one of the most difficult decisions of their lives. We help you understand your options to protect yourself and your children, empowering you to move forward in a way that honors your family’s future and allows everyone to thrive. We’d be honored to talk with you. Reach out anytime, we’re here to help.
