Do people stay together just for the kids? Is it a good idea?

According to a recent UK survey of 2,000 married couples, 25% say they are only together to get their kids through childhood and will separate as soon as they are grown up.  They cited extra marital affairs, growing apart and ‘friend zoning’ of the partner as the main reasons for their unhappiness within the relationship.

But what effect does this have on the children?

My own research finds that many who did stay together for their children in hindsight regret it.  Mainly due to the emotional impact the bad or failing relationship had on their children’s overall wellbeing, before, during and after the separation.  While the general thinking is that children want their parents to be together no matter what, I wonder if the damage done is greater than the benefit of a seemingly ‘happy’ family.

Happy Ever After

We all want to offer our children the ‘Happy ever after’.   There is no doubt the ideal way to live a life is to find someone to love, who loves you back, have children together and travel the highways and byways of life’s journey together.  But when this becomes impossible and love is gone, what message do we deliver to our children as to what constitutes an acceptable relationship if we are just pretending.   If they constantly see conflict and disrespect between a couple, not to mention violence, is this teaching them wrongly how do conduct their own relationships in the future. Are we causing untold damage to their idea of what a loving relationship should look like?

In some cases, when grown up children discover that their parents stayed together for their sake, they feel ‘cheated’ and ‘annoyed’ at their parents for putting on a show for their sake and find it even more difficult to accept because of the level of dishonesty that they experienced.

There’s no easy way.

The ideal scenario if separation is inevitable is to put the children at the centre of all decisions.  Research is showing more and more that if a separation or divorce is handled sensitively by both parents who can put their own emotions and anger aside for the sake of their children, that children can prosper through a separation, and have remarkably better outcomes than if the family had stayed together, unhappily, until the children are grown, or if the separational conflict is played out in all its destructive glory in front of the children.

For further advice or to discuss with our panel of experts, email admin@separated.ie

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