Parents today constantly stress about how their actions will impact their children. But they are often sadly oblivious to how their children impact their own emotional, physical and mental states. As author Jennifer Senior argues in her new book, “All Joy And No Fun,” raising children can place peculiar stresses on parents and limit their earning potential and social lives. In fact, research suggests that marital satisfaction reaches a low point when parents have toddler-aged children.
Given this revelation, does it make sense for parents to hold off on “calling it quits” on a marriage until their kids have grown up and gotten a little bigger? Maybe the dissatisfaction in your marriage stems from the fact that you’re spread thin, financially stressed and emotionally overtaxed because of your children.
Intriguingly, if that’s the case, and if you just wait a few years, you might find that your marriage will improve and that you will no longer need (or want) to get divorced.
Obviously, you need to do what’s right for yourself and your family.
One of the implications from this research is that you might benefit from divorcing your thinking about the divorce (so to speak) from your concerns about your children’s welfare.
Studies suggest that children of divorce do struggle in the short-term (one to three years out from the divorce), but that, over time, most of these children do just as well in school and in life as do children from intact families.
For assistance with the nuts and bolts of your prospective California divorce, call Dinnebier & Demmerle right now to set up a consultation with our attorneys.