Support thread for those staying for the children

[officetolet]

This isn’t about staying in abusive relationships, or those who financially have no choice but to stay etc. Or those whose partners have left them and they have no choice but to try to co-parent. Those situations are serious and valid, and deserve their own thread. This is for parents (mums) who are staying because staying is basically the least worst option for the children.

I read a lot of threads where parents talk about “putting the children first”. Often after a separation has happened, and usually to bemoan the other parents apparent lack of ability to “put the children first”, but I often think the best interests of the children would have been not to leave the relationship in the first place.

I read about children being happier with happier parents, but do children really want to split their time in two? Not sleep in the same bed for more than 7 nights in a row for the rest of their childhood? Choose to stay with one parent to have some stability and feel guilty about making that choice? Not seeing both of their parents each day? Leaving home when they can in order to have that “one home”, and vowing not to do it to their own kids? Is this not about the parent’s happiness, to the sacrifice of their children?

I’m really not trying to be goady. I am just in this situation, suspect other mums are too, and I’m looking for a safe space to have some support and to talk about it.

I am staying in my marriage not necessarily because it’s the right decision for me, but it is for my DC. Yes, we’re probably not showing a great example of a happy marriage, but I still think, on balance, it’s better than the alternative. There is an element of sacrifice on my part, but as teenagers often say “I didn’t ask to be born!”. I made the decision to have kids, and in doing so I knew I would always put them first. This is what I am doing.

Is anyone in the same boat and want to share some support?

I agree with you, I work with children and have had a lot of training into adverse childhood experiences (ACEs)

There is a study by sociologists Booth and Amato that found that children in low conflict houses were found to have better outcomes, if parents stayed together. i think this has been replicated elsewhere.

Low to moderate conflict counts as everyday disagreements, arguments, or emotional coldness without abuse.

If the conflict is high conflict (abuse) it is better to split.

I was going to mention thi study too! I've read aboit it and it cemented my decision to stay. Sure I sometimes doubt myself as I'm putting my happiness aside, bt really what I'm doing s putting my children's happiness first.
Many people here are saying they wish their parents split, but really we cant know what THAT would have been like. On MN there're so many other stories about how their lives got messed up because parents split (bad co-parenting, custody conflict, not seeing much of one parent and feeling abandoned/rejected, new half-siblings...)

@Getmeouttathismess yep the study really did cement for me what I’d witnessed for years watching children. It’s easy to say ‘I wish my parents had split up’ but you gave no idea what could have then happened to cause you harm. I grew up in a low to moderate conflict house and they did split up and the ripples are still evident years later, in fact we were talking about this last night, despite both my parents trying to protect my siblings and I from the damage.

Yes I’m staying even though I’m not entirely happy. I’m also not unhappy. We’re just not in love with each other anymore. We’re still really good friends, more than that actually, we’re family. We’re a good team, there isn’t any tension and we don’t argue, maybe a bit of light bickering occasionally but that’s just normal long term relationship stuff. Mostly we have a very happy house, we support and appreciate each other, we’re financially comfortable as a unit and the kids are happy and well adjusted. I’m not going to risk all of that. Do I wish I had everything I have plus the romantic love? Of course, but I won’t sacrifice my family unit to get it.

Really interested in the definition of “low conflict” here. If one or both partners avoid asking for things or raising awkward subjects to the point where they are unhappy, in order to avoid conflict (this was the situation in the marriage I left) is that still low conflict? Or if someone has eg cheated and they couple decide to stay together and try to hide the fallout from the children, is that low conflict? I guess what I’m wondering is does it have to be genuinely that there are no serious issues, or is avoiding open conflict in front of the children the key factor?

Interested because according to that study I made the worst possible set of decisions by minimising and hiding conflict for years and then (after much effort on both sides) divorcing…

There’s no way I could have continued in my marriage left when my youngest was 2! The unhappiness, the stress, the resentment, emotional abuse no way I was letting my children watch me suffer like that forever and then losing respect for me for the sake of staying for the kids’. I’d rather be dead than live with that man again.

Sorry to tell you what you blatantly do not want to hear.

But as someone who has worked with chimdren for 25+ years, of all ages, from all walks life, it really does not benefit the children to stay in an unhappy relationship.

Yes of course it also isnt good for children to have two parents not coparenting amicably, or have a parent abandon them. But staying in an unhappy relationship means you are showing children what is acceptable and they will see the arguing, silence, lack of affection or a man not pulling his weight or whatever the issue is and assume it is normal and ok.

The amount of children who know their parents are unhappy is unbelievable also.

From personal experience as well, having girls, I felt it very important to leave the unhappy marriage I was in, because if my daughters came to me asking for advice in my situation I would absolutely help them leave. I didnt want them growing up seeing me unhappy. You are in control of your own happiness, you set your boundaries and your tolerances.

They have seen me be independent, manage a house and work in my own, do DIY, sort the car etc you name it I did it, so they can see they can do it too. They dont NEED anyone they can be alone if they choose.

Fast forward 4 years and my children see me with a man who is affectionate, kind, does his share of the household stuff, cooks for us every day, plays with them, does homework with them, cheers them on at clubs and loves me vividly in front of their eyes every day.....this is the type of mam I want for them....so I show them this

Me too!
I have no happy memories from my childhood.
As a mum now, if I was in that situation I would not stay together for the children.

From what I gather high conflict would be overt fighting, or emotionally abusive behaviour that the children witness.
Disagreements, not being openly lovely/romantic, lack of balance of household work etc... would below conflict.
Their finding is basically that "children are happier with 2 separated happy parents" is not that black and white.
For children, divorce isn't automatically the healthier option just because the parents aren't happy. Nor is staying together automatically healthier.
The broad pattern looks something like:
Low-conflict, stable family → generally favourable
High-conflict family that successfully separates → potentially much better
High-conflict family that remains chronically hostile → potentially very damaging

My mum’s parents stayed together and that’s one of the reasons she and my dad split up. It wasn’t easy, obviously, but I remember feeling so incredibly relieved even though we had to move house and school and money was tight. They never shouted, they never fought but we were aware of the silences, the notes they left each other on the kettle ffs.

Are you planning to stay together forever? Or will you leave once they’re adults? In my experience and from several friends it was easier to go through parents divorcing as a young teen than a young adult. The people I know who really felt their lives had been a lie and everything felt very traumatic had parents who split when they went to uni. The guilt that parents had been unhappy for them and that the holidays, the photos, the Christmas days were lies.

Low-conflict, stable family → generally favourable
High-conflict family that successfully separates → potentially much better

If separating from large amounts of conflict is better than staying with small amounts of conflict, wouldn’t separating from small amounts of conflict be better than staying with even smaller amounts of conflict?

No. That's exactly what the study found, that it is not.
It was also replicated later in other studies.
Basically it's the balance of pros and cons: high conflict is a really heavy con, that outweighs the cons of divorce. The opposite is true for low conflict.
Of course this is studying the outcomes for the children, you may argue that for the parents it would always be best to divorce if they re unhappy, and you may be right.

Of the people that I know who stayed together "for the children", once you scratched the surface of that it was more about finances and not being able to afford to split. I think people should be honest if they are staying together for financial reasons. It's a valid reason, though not necessarily one without consequences, not least for the children themselves. I should add that they have all since split anyway.

I have a few friends whose parents stayed together "for the children", who I spoke to before my own separation after years of marriage. They all said they wished their parents had split earlier, and suffered varying levels of guilt and self-blame for their parents' unhappiness.

Not to mention the difficulty for one or both parents in maintaining a nice "happy" home when effectively knowing that they would otherwise wish to separate. Surely, more often than not, this would eventually lead to resentment, passive aggression, hostility, financial secrecy, seeking affection outside the marriage, etc. And the stress of hiding this from the children. I don't believe for an instant that many families can actively achieve this, without some degree of self-delusion.

I think this is different though. I think the marriages where people are staying for the kids are generally where there's no or very little abuse/stress. The couple have just fallen out of love and they have evolved/changed to the point they just aren't very compatible as a couple, this is definitley the case in my marriage.

That was the the case with my parents.

I agree with everything you wrote. It is a sacrifice and if home life remaining together is a nice happy house despite your inner feelings, that definitely helps. For relationships where the atmosphere is strained or even worse.. toxic... that's when it's time to end it. I would however be prepared for if the other person decides to leave one day. For anyone in this situation make sure you're financially sorted so you wouldn't be left in a mess if you can and have ducks in a row if that day ever comes.

I’ve always wondered about this - my parents divorced when I was 7 and I don’t remember being upset by it or particularly bothered really, maybe I was on some level but it’s certainly not something I feel scarred by. Going through parental separation as adult seems much worse to me, especially as there seems to be more chance of the children being drawn in. divorcing shortly after a levels always seems like the ultimate admission of ‘I clung on as long as I could’.

one guy I knew discovered his dad was having an affair when we were students (so, tbf, quite extreme) his parents divorced and he was absolutely devastated, it completely shattered his view of his dad who had previously been a bit of a hero to him and he had a bit of a breakdown. Feel like situation could have been avoided by a tactical divorce…

I hadn’t heard of this so looked it up - cant access the full paper but the abstract seems a bit different from your summary. “Individuals experiencing “low-stress” parental divorces did not differ appreciably from those who grew up in happily intact homes.” So it seems to be more about how amicably you divorce than the divorce itself.

It’s also from 1991 and was done in in the US, so it really needs supporting by more recent studies and uk specific ones. 1991 is now a long time ago…

academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/69/3/895/2232561?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false

I can’t see the origins study but found this from a 2001 article that interviewed the authors “children whose divorced parents had low-conflict marriages (that is, they rarely fought and reported being pretty happy during the marriage, then continued to socialize and said they still loved each other after divorce), fared worse in adult romantic relationships.”

I find this really interesting, as it seems to describe VERY low conflict marriages. The study was carried out in the 80s in the US so I wonder if there was a higher prevalence of people getting married young and essentially just getting bored that they managed to capture? I’d be really interested to see replication studies on a different population.

The authors seem to attribute the findings that ‘low conflict’ marriages that end in divorce lead to poorer outcomes for the kids to the fact that the divorce comes out of the blue. This article makes the conclusion that it is therefore worth working at your marriage (which maybe it is) but you could equally conclude that it would be better to divorce in a way that allows your children to understand what is happening.

Also, ‘working at your marriage’ is different from ‘staying together for the kids’. The former means you are prioritising your relationship and making an effort, not passively accepting it is over. It seems like this paper is not that clear cut. It also says on the abstract that “Respondents from disrupted families of origin scored lower than those from happily intact families of origin on measures of psychological, social, and marital well-being ― but not on measures of socioeconomic adequacy. These differences, however, were generally weak in magnitude.” So not a strong finding.

annoying not to be a able to read the paper!

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jul-09-cl-20178-story.html

I’m very similar. What are your current thoughts on staying together after your DC leave home? I feel like for us as a couple living with young kids is putting significant strain on our relationship, because we are tired etc. I still want to see how I feel later when we have the space to be more of a couple again. But as of now, I’ve basically lost sexual interest in my DH and feel our relationship is lacking in other ways as well. But, we get along, we’re good friends and he’s obviously important to me.

Can I just ask, are you still having sex with your husbands?