Staying Together For The Children
Kung Fu Monkey quotes his friend Jeff Rothpan's joke:
"My parents stayed together for the sake of the children. Thank God, because there's nothing better for children than fifteen years of screaming, spite and death threats."
link via the ever-amusing Defamer
maggie gallagher's ideas represent a slippery slope to government controlled breeding.
kittie at October 24, 2005 7:41 AM
Maggie Gallagher looks to me like homophobia, religious nuttery, and "The Handmaid's Tale" in drag as concern for humanity.
Amy Alkon at October 24, 2005 8:22 AM
A competing viewpoint:
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007435
See also, Wallerstein:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0786886161/104-3487819-6883117?v=glance
Baby boomers have a lot of arrogant behaviors. Perhaps most grotesque is their reflexive, inane embrace of the rhetoric that "This divorce is better for the kids, because they won't have to see us fight." The importance of marrying well, and of making continuing personal sacrifice on behalf of family, gets no place in many lives. We needn't imagine that the 19 century was a paradise of loving family meals to know that recent generations have bungled things badly.
It's a holocaust of the human heart, I tell ya, and history will mock us as harshly as we mock the slaveholders.
Crid at October 24, 2005 8:37 AM
As hard as it was going through my parent's divorce, I can't begin to express the sense of relief when they announced they were splitting. Someone had finally named the elephant in the room, and I no longer had to think I was the crazy one.
deja pseu at October 24, 2005 8:50 AM
Amy, I share your take on Gallagher exactly! There's only so much space between saying who can't have kids and saying who must.
deja pseu at October 24, 2005 8:52 AM
I don't have time to look it up now, Crid, but Stephanie Coontz and others criticize Wallerstein's data as flawed for various reasons. I do think people who have children should put them first.
Amy Alkon at October 24, 2005 8:58 AM
a divorce, when handled appropriately, is better than the alternative.
i am grateful to my parents for divorcing and trying to make the best of their lives rather than forcing me to grow up in a charade of a family. i realized that when it happened, when i was six.
i know what a marriage is and isn't supposed to be. if i didn't have my parents' example, i'd be in a horrible marriage right now.
the problem isn't people not taking marriage seriously enough, it's not taking parenting serious enough. marriage is just a legal and quasi-religious codification of a cultural tradition.
g*mart at October 25, 2005 2:07 PM
>a divorce, when handled appropriately, is better than the alternative.
g*mart, that depends on the problems that led to the divorce.
Too many people divorce for reasons that are selfish, stupid or fall way short of what should justify wrenching kids' lives apart. Like "I'm just not happy or fulfilled any more" or deluding yourself into thinking you'd be happier with that person you're having an affair with, when the reality is that you're bringing your own baggage along, only now with infidelity (which can't make for a pleasant divorce), child support and a visitation schedule on top of it.
I recently read an article (Newsweek?) about a study that found that even kids from "good" divorces suffered enormous emotional fall-out, carrying over into adulthood. No small wonder, when kids tend to internalize problems and blame themselves, and also have to deal with different rules and routines in two households (assuming they see both parents regularly), missing one parent when with the other, not getting to see the non-custodial parent for chunks of time (again, for most kids), and other assorted issues that are necessarily part of even the most civil of divorces.
Imho, apparently borne out by the data, absent objectively serious problems, keeping the parental unit together (absent objectively serious problems) is part of good parenting.
Melissa at October 26, 2005 8:29 PM
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