How to Tell if Having Kids Will Ruin Your Marriage
I don’t know if you’ve heard, but having kids will destroy your marriage. It used to be just because kids are terrible, but now it’s allegedly because everyone is so obsessed with their children. But I say neither of these things will destroy your marriage automatically. Allow me to present a more reasonable way to predict splitsville.
You should be warned, though: The case against you is not good. In a new story over at Quartz by Danielle and Astro Teller, we learn that American parenting is killing the American marriage because American parenting is now a religion. Proof of that, Teller argues, is in all these classic religion-like signs found in modern parenting:
As with many religions, complete unthinking devotion is required from its practitioners. Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children, and we must never speak a disloyal word about our relationships with our offspring. Children always come first. We accept this premise so reflexively today that we forget that it was not always so.
They go on to lay out that we can’t badmouth our kids. We can’t say we love our children more than our spouse. Mothers especially are not permitted to enjoy things outside their children. The pitfalls of accepting this new normal, she says, are serious:
Parents who do not feel free to express their feelings honestly are less likely to resolve problems at home. Children who are raised to believe that they are the center of the universe have a tough time when their special status erodes as they approach adulthood. Most troubling of all, couples who live entirely child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home.
She also cites that divorce rates are rising fastest for “empty nesters” — couples who’s kids have just flown the coop. My problem with this particular brand of haranguing, which is very popular these days, is that it’s based on a few flawed premises I can’t automatically endorse. One is that it suggests that being married forever is still the ideal, when in fact many people feel traditional marriage is itself a flawed system that needs overhauling. And two, it ignores the fact that modern parenting requires more hovering because we have fewer other people — aka, the village — to do some hovering for us. Third, it promotes the ludicrous but unstoppably popular idea that parenting was better “before” when parents did less and cared less, which is a wildly speculative thing to say that can’t really ever be proven on account of how hard it would be to measure the quality of every person who existed and was raised by the last generation, and then compare those people to the quality of every person being raised now, once they are all grown up and can also have their overall worth measured in some reliable way. And then — get this — somehow make a value judgment about which group is less dicky overall. Cool idea, but ludicrous.
In addition to those quibbles, I think it’s misleading to suggest that kids destroy marriages when what they really do is reveal the fault lines. I would like to have happy, wonderful, passionate, engaged, mature couples with a proven ability to work through problems please tell me about how having a kid torpedoed their love like a paid marriage assassin. I’m going to guess with as much scientific backing as everyone else’s opinion on marriage that those couples are in the minority.
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