Read this article today about divorces and how they influence children. The opinion article argues that divorces are bad for children in all relationships where the parents do not engage in explicit fights or violence. As the latter only supposedly make up about 1/3 of divorcees, in general divorces should be avoided and the state work for helping couples to stay together. Children to divorced parents apparently suffer from more troubles growing up, with tendencies to start smoking more easily, not get as well educated as children where parents stay together, have more problems making friends etc.
Although the article has some good arguments and the writers make sure to emphasis in the last lines that the society should not make divorces more difficult nor should single-parents be blamed, there is still something about it that make me want to scream... or at least write a blog input about it ;)
My first reaction is that the children of divorced parents that I have met have succeeded as well as those whose parents are still together. There life might have been a bit more difficult in times - missing one parent, not trusting relationships as easily (but then again, why is this considered a bad thing?) and so on - but these difficulties have often made them into stronger persons.
My own experience was to thank my parents for having gotten a divorce! Their relationship was unliveable at the end - for everyone including my brother and me who, like most children, directly felt when our parents were sad or angry with each other, even when they did not fight in front of us. You can feel the lack of love, of patience, of want to stay living together and it makes the atmosphere at home quite heavy indeed. My parents also fought sometimes in front of us, so I guess that should put my experience within the range of 1/3 of children to fighting divorced couples.
However, what couple - where the love has run out, where you want to continue with your life without the other person but where you stay on just for the sake of the children - what couple in that situation would never fight? Living with someone is often quite complicated, and if you don't have love to smoothen down things, how do you pass over all those small things that irritates you without ever fighting? I must say that I highly doubt that 2/3 of children of divorces had parents who never verbally fought... If this is the case, then perhaps it is because the parents were smart enough to get divorced once they realised that they weren't meant to stay together, rather than staying on for the sake of it and getting into one fight after another as you do... Perhaps there are other ways of making divorcee children fit better into a smooth life than trying to enforce marriages to go on once the love has died out. I would guess that one of the reasons why they get into trouble more often is rather due to the lack of money in many single-household families than to the fact that the parents have chosen to live their lives...?
Finally, I don't see why the state should get involved in this very private matter and I can't see why two people should stay together after their love is gone just for their children. Children are extremely important, but not at the cost of all the happiness of their parents. And people should be allowed to be happy and I have always believed that happy parents (whether it means parents that get divorced, parents that go back to work quite early as they feel better that way, or that want to stay at home for the first 10 years or so, parents that live their lives while still providing for their children) make happier children. Me for one, was happier once my parents divorced and they could calm down, be happy and become friends, going on living the lives that they preferred. Having my father moving back across the continent was very difficult, but for me not linked that much to the divorce as to his homesickness. In short, I am what you could call a happy child of divorced parents and recommend getting a divorce to anyone if the relationship doesn't work anymore.
My last 2 cents before leaving for holiday tomorrow, to see my mother and family in Sweden and to perhaps thank my mother again for having taken the necessary step to render the lives of her, my father, my brother and me so much more simple and happy. To be honest, I am quite sure that my brother and I would probably have had more problems growing up if my parents had stayed together.
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