“The greatest gift a couple can give their baby is a loving relationship, because that relationship nourishes Baby’s development.”
― John M. Gottman, And Baby Makes Three: The Six-Step Plan for Preserving Marital Intimacy and Rekindling Romance After Baby Arrives
I’ll let you take a couple minutes to swallow this one. That’s what happens when you feed your mind off mainstream pop culture bs for so long. You end up falling for anything that resonates the irrefutable truth of society deep into your ears. Fuck dem echo chambers!
Romantic relationships are at their core incredibly fragile organizations. They become all the more fragile when you throw children into their vortex. Many parents make the mistake of putting their kids center stage in their lives. Consequently, their relationship with their spouse takes the good old rusty seat in the back seat of their overpacked car.
Make no mistake here. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t provide care, nurturing and love to your babies that require you to be attuned to them, especially when they are entirely dependent on you.
The idea is rather that you should not make your children the center of your universe. If this idea makes you cringe or feel uncomfortable, it’s about time that you wave goodbye to the old wives tales that society has cemented into your mind.
The truth is that the number one factor that can predict your kids’ healthy emotional growth isn’t the number of extracurriculars they do per year. It isn’t the number of playdates you booked for them this week. It isn’t the infinite supply of gadgets you’ve bought them last Christmas. It is rather the healthy and loving marriage of their parents.
That’s the best gift you can give to your kids. To show them firsthand the importance of modeling love, compassion and understanding by giving the best of you to your life partner. The parenting literature supports the statements I’m writing to you here. Unfortunately, these powerful evidences rarely makes it to the media because still to this day, admitting that you love your spouse more than your kids is taboo af. Yet it shouldn’t be. You were husband and wife before kids came along. You ought not to become solely mommy and daddy when the kids enter the picture.
Kids pick up on so many things, and even though they may not be able to voice what they feel in words, they are nonetheless extremely aware of the dynamics that is present inside a household. They know when the connection between their parents is unhealthy.
They feel it when there’s hatefulness rising through their air. By turning away from your partner instead of turning toward him, you are not only damaging your relationship with your spouse.
You are indirectly affecting the well being of your own kids.
Hence why it is completely faulty to think that "staying together for the kids" is a wise and noble decision. To the contrary, staying in a partnership where emotional disconnection, fighting and resentment is the focus of such a union, you are inflicting way more harm to your children than if you would have taken the decision to part ways. Needless to say, parental fighting is extremely harmful for children.
While divorce does nonetheless cause harm to the family as a whole, the profound pain that it entails can subside throughout the years and with proper healing. However, when kids witness the toxicity ever present between their parents, that creates a dangerous climate for the children to grow up in, and one that does not offer the calm that typically comes after a divorce gets sorted.