Why do so many parents break up before their DC start school?

[StrangerThings123]

Inspired by a discussion I had with friends earlier in the week.

We are all mid 30’s, and when we went to school the general consensus is that it would be very rare for one of our classmates to have parents who weren’t together. I’m talking Primary school here, so up to the age of 11.

Nowadays, it seems there’s a huge rise in parents breaking up when their DC are young. What do people put this down to? I said the ease at which people can now move on and date e.g the apps is a big factor.

I did this.

thought we were doing the right thing by sticking it out. Doubled down and had another.

pretty quickly things fell apart though. He’s a really good guy but we just weren’t in love and you can’t fake it.

Not knowing each other well enough before having kids,

Honestly, thinking of the friends I’ve had since my dc were babies up to now, only 2 of them have split up. One broke up a few times when their first was a baby, got back together, got married, had another baby, then got divorced. This was a couple from our NCT group, the guy also tried to make a move on one of the other mums from our baby group. 😳 It was a proper mess. Other friend divorced when her eldest was probably 12/13. She’s pretty much an alcoholic, and her ex just got tired of the drama. Otherwise, thinking generally of my friend group with kids the same age (primary and secondary school), we’re all early to mid 40s and still (seemingly anyway) happily married. I actually expect where there will be divorces, if there are any, it will be as kids reach early adulthood.

I grew up in the 80s though and my parents divorced when I was in primary school. They definitely weren’t the only ones and I didn’t feel like the weirdo with the parents who weren’t together anymore.

My guess is though that the answer is the same as it’s always been: lots of people get married and have kids thinking it will make a shaky relationship stronger. And that’s pretty stupid. Having children will test even the strongest relationships. You really have to be properly equal partners for it to work, or both completely bought into the idea of traditional gender roles. You can’t be half and half. I imagine more relationships may end now because women have the financial freedom to survive ending them.

Back in the 80s, my mum was the higher earner in a good corporate job (my dad did skilled manual labour). She could afford to buy a house on her own and continue to pay my private school fees with no help from my dad (he refused to pay any maintenance and only saw me for the day a few times a year). She was unusually financially independent for a young woman in the 80s.

It’s also obviously more socially acceptable now. I remember the first time a teacher referred to me as a child “from a broken home” and I was like WTF?! We wouldn’t say that now.

hardly any of my kid's friend’s parents are separated. I can only think of 1. I also don’t have any friends or husband’s friends who are divorced. The only divorced person I know is my mum. Sounds like this might be unusual.

Underestimating the work required as you expect sunshine and rainbows. Getting impregnated by a selfish fuckwit too early before they shop their true colours.

In my case, my ex husband had an affair with another married women with school aged children so that was two families with separated parents right off the bat. In my experience, people do not value the family unit anymore. My ex very simply saw family life as a constraint and walked away quite happily leaving three children under five. My children are happy; I am happy: but we all suffered terribly at the time.

Because women have choice now. They didn’t used to.

I'm the same age as you and I don't think it was "very rare" - my parents divorced when I was 6, and I definitely wasn't the only one in the class although I think I was a minority. Maybe you didn't know the marital status of every child's parents? I only know the ones whose houses I went to play at.

What I did notice though is that whenever I told people this they would be shocked and say "Oh I'm sorry!!" and act like it was this terrible thing, up until about maybe 2002/3 at which point it just changed to being a totally normal piece of info, like I'd told them we had a pet cat or something. Of course I was older then - but it did seem by that point that more than half of my friends' parents were no longer together.

When I was 8, so in the mid 90s, a teacher told my mum I was "disturbed" and it was because I was from "a broken home". (Just neurodivergent, but thanks judgy teacher!) I cannot imagine a teacher saying such a thing to a parent today.

I did split up with DS1's dad before he started school, and I think it was because the stresses of early parenthood really highlighted and excacerbated the cracks which were already there in our relationship, which I had ignored up until then because I thought that they were normal and/or "all men" were like that (my dad,clearly, not being the greatest role model!) or they didn't really affect me so deeply when I was more independent, working etc.

Once I was vulnerable with a child and fully dependent on him I was absolutely miserable because he was an emotionally abusive bastard, and plus it became completely obvious he didn't care about me at all and it was a major turn off that he was not as obsessed with our child as I was.

Totally different with DH (dad of my other kids) but I had the advantage that I already had a child when we got together so I knew what I was looking for. I wouldn't have had a clue before I had a child for real.

My parents got divorced when I was 5 and my brother was 3 because my mum had an affair. HTH

No resilience, and no determination to make things work.

Let's hope we don't go to war with anyone...

When my children first started school, most mothers ( sometimes fathers) were SAHP until their children were about 7.
Now usually both parents work. It is very stressful for them working, looking after the children and running a home. If one of the parents doesn’t pull their weight it matters more.

That's interesting I'm late 30s a few of my friends parents had split up in junior school, both of my mums siblings had divorced too it wasn't that rare. Probably nowadays its more common because most people aren't religious and don't believe so much in marriage being so important and secondly women don't just put up with shit that they might have in the past.

It’s way easier to separate now.

I know most people of my mums age and older, waited until their kids had left secondary school or even became adults before leaving.

Most of the people I know even now wait until the kids are in secondary school.

I think it’s fantastic people are able to leave even earlier nowadays.

Mothers do get the rough end of the stick but it’s not as bad as it used to be.

Women didn’t work or worked PT, single mothers were judged, men didn’t share parental responsibility etc so leaving was often harder than staying.

I think it’s quite a big combination of things:

1. Women, quite rightly, not feeling like they have to put up with any man’s shit anymore.
2. Social media making people think normal life is not good enough.
3. The early years of child rearing puts quite a lot of strain on a relationship and many people think that it won’t get better so they break up instead of working on it or waiting and seeing.

I think women are more financially independent these days and far less likely to put up with any shite behaviour from their partners. Which is not a bad thing.

I think the stats are that divorce rates are down - it was way more common to get divorced in the 90s.

I'm also mid 30s and none of my friends have got divorced. When I was growing up about 50% of my friends had divorced parents and it felt like the norm

No, this isn't because of dating apps.

Fewer people getting married before having children to begin with
Far less stigma around divorce and single mothers
A dramatic shift in women with college degrees and strong earnings potential over the last few generations
More families have two working parents but learned expectations about gender roles within families haven't kept up - those early years see a spike of issues around inequitable division of labor
Laws against financial institutions, employers and landlords discriminating against women, especially unmarried ones
Changes in divorce and family-law
A general shift away from the idea that it's better for children if their parents stay in an unhappy, toxic marriage than divorce

These all build on each other and over generations. People absolutely aren't divorcing at higher rates now than they were when we were kids, but there have been some shifts towards a higher portion of divorces happening in the first 10 years of marriages, and it's become more common to have children without marrying first (this is particularly more common in the middle class now than it was when we were kids).

But one of the biggest shifts is that not having a mum and dad who live together is something that is openly accepted now and we tend to actively discourage assumptions that that's what every child's family looks like. So a big part of our perception of how much more common children with parents who aren't together are now just comes down to it simply being talked about in a far more open, matter-of-fact way as one of the many ways a "normal family" can look.

In my daughter’s primary class of 29 children, 3 had divorced parents and 1 lived with their grandparents.

Seven year itch?

I think we value ourselves over the family unit.

Id say our parents generation valued the family unit more that themselves - which would mean mainly women, and a portion of me , would put up with awful behaviour to keep the family together because they needed to put on a front or just wanted to stay together for the children.

I do think it’s a shame, I also think our values have changed. I think in a relationship you really have to compromise and I think less people are willing to do that.

Y3 seemed to be prime divorce year in DS’s class, by the end of that year I think a third of the children had separated parents

In my circle of friends - we're old-time friends, dating back to school years, we see each other all the time, camp together every year - only one couple has split, the remaining 10ish couples have stayed together and had kids. Almost without exception all our parents are separated. They were London hippy-types, socialists/feminists, had babies in the 70s. So this rule doesn't always apply. I often marvel at how by contrast we've all stayed together. A reaction against our own parenting? Having each other helps us to manage our relationships? More conscious about having that stability?

The ease of dating apps 😂😂 said by someone who has never tried to date as a single parent.

In my case and in many other cases I have noticed, women get sick of having to do the majority of the parenting and housework, but yet unlike in the “old days” they are now expected to bring in 50% (or more) of the household income and the men are just expected to bring in 50% of the income (or even less) and think that they are hard done by because they sometimes have to parent alone for 2 hours a week. On top of that men usually expect twice weekly sex and women are exhausted and touched out by all of the expectations put on them.

So they split, and because the woman is now used to doing 90% of everything anyway, it’s not a huge hardship to suddenly have to do 100%. She might even, if her ex is such a “great hands on dad” like her friends say, get even more than 2 hours a week to herself. And no more having to have sex with and share a bed with a snoring, smelly man.

Yep, me too. Leaving a marriage is not a light decision. If it is becoming more common, it is because the issues in the marriage are glaring. For example, there is more awareness of what abusive behaviour is actually like and more acceptable to leave on the basis of it, whilst in the past I can imagine women being blamed if they chose to leave a marriage.

It’s not a stigma to be separated these days. You shouldn’t put up with a bad/toxic relationship because you have kids as it teaches them to stay in detrimental relationships.

People aren’t as religious so aren’t frightened of what ‘god’ may do. They won’t be looked down upon by society al these days and instead will be championed on to leave the relationship if it’s not working

Children pick up on parents arguments even passive aggressive and staging in a toxic household isn’t doing the child any favours