Should or Shouldn’t Parents Divorce?

People want to create bonds with their loved one and thus they commit to live together forever under a term which we call “marriage”. However, obstacles always come and depending on how the couples react to these problems, whether or not they can keep their marriage intact. But it is not easy to maintain their status of marriage as sometimes the obstacles are unmanageable and the next thing they consider to do is to divorce. Although divorce is inevitable in some cases but the impacts are unavoidable. Divorce for couples with children will give more negative impacts to the family. Parents should consider the negative results of divorcing because in most cases, the impacts of divorcing outweigh the benefit of it which raise a question in people’s mind that is, “should or shouldn’t couples divorce?”.
According to an article “The Top 10 Reasons for Divorce” there are top ten reasons why couple divorce. One of the most common reasons is “infidelity” in marriage where there is a third person in the relationship by means one of the couple cannot maintain his/her faith for the spouse. There are many other reasons that break a family apart such as “communication breakdown, physical, psychological or emotional abuse, financial issues, sexual incompatibility, boredom, religious and cultural strains, child rearing, addiction, differences in priorities and expectations”. These reasons drive people to lose their control of their emotions and end up hurting each other. In that case, divorcing is the first thing that appears in their mind.
Woman employment can also lead to unstable relationship between couples which might result in divorce. According to the article “Women's employment, marital happiness, and divorce”, women employment decrease the stability of marriage despite of the high utility the family can get by receiving additional income because “the economic opportunity hypothesis asserts that labor force participation does not undermine happy marriages but gives women the resources to escape unhappy marriages”. Getting extra money is tempting to many women and makes them choose to entangle themselves in employment to have money to be spent on materialistic. But employment can make them lost their focus in marriage which will create dispute within couples as people believe that the most stable marriages are those that follow the role of exchange such that “the wife exchanges her domestic services (including childbearing) for the husband's economic support and vice versa”. Mothers will spend less time with their children and more likely to abandon them when they work. This action is prone to leading them to social issues like drugs which might result in family problem. Parents will fight and start blaming each other when their children are tangled in social issues. This will lead them to a choice of divorcing.
There are chances that divorce might lead them to depression because of the negative impacts that is dominating. Quarrelling in marriage is inevitable but people have choices whether to let their anger and disappointment lead them to a dead end where depression, poverty, unemployment, health problem and the destruction of their children psychology meets them which will be discussed soon. Divorce will not only cause pain to the couples but also to the children and this is the reason why parents should deliberate upon their choices.
There is no way that divorce doesn’t affect the work life of people. The couples that have decided to divorce need to spend a lot of time and money in finding lawyers. Moreover one of them will need to take care of their children by him/herself as written in “Employees' Divorce Harms Employers” that “they typically spend a large amount of time and energy finding a lawyer, revising household budgets, looking for a new place to live and making child care arrangements”. A study by Richard Mueller, a researcher at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada discovered that “in the year after a divorce, employees lost an average of more than 168 hours of work time”. This will affect the efficiency of the workers and when they get too inefficient, they are at the stake of losing their jobs which will give extra suffering.
When parents divorce, it goes to the worst for the children. Now both parents have to divide their finance individually and get lesser income comparing to when they join their salaries and thus they might suffer from poverty. According to the article “Single-Parent Families Are More Likely to Be Poor”, there was a study in University of Michigan that proved that divorce has resulted in nearly 50% decrease in yearly income. The study shows that “during the years children lived with two parents, their family incomes averaged $43,600, and when these same children lived with one parent, their family incomes averaged $25,300”. When the parents divorce, in some cases one of the parents stop to provide the needs for the other parent and thus he/she needs to support his/her children alone. The children that experience a sudden drop in financial status might have a higher probability to commit crimes because of the society pressure.
Working is time consuming and a lot more works are waiting ahead of the divorced parents which cause the children to spend more time with other people than with their biological parents. Dangerously the children are prone to getting physical abuse when their parents rely the lives of their children on others which according to the article “Broken Homes Increase the Risk of Child Abuse”, children often suffer from “homicide, rape, aggravated assault and other offenses” from other people because nobody is giving attention to them and the parents themselves do not know what is happening to their children when they ask somebody else to take care of them. There was a case written in the same article where “a 7-year-old North Side girl was beaten and burned more than 37 times with cigarettes with her uncle, who was living with the family and babysitting the first-grader and her siblings”. After knowing this case, you might want to deliberate on a question “are you ready to trust your children’s lives on others?”.
Spending lesser time with their parents, children tend to entangle in social issue because they have less attention and guidance. In the article “Parents Should Be Held Legally Responsible for Juvenile Crime”, the author “believes that parents who fail to adequately monitor their children's behavior ought to be held legally responsible when those children commit crimes”. Children need direction in their lives and when their parents divorce, the workload for each parents increase as they will need to manage their lives individually and so they will spend less time monitoring their children. In the article “Single Parenthood Increases the Risk of Juvenile Crime”, it states that “two parents can supervise the child's behavior more readily than one. Misbehavior can continue undetected and uncorrected for longer periods of time [in a single-parent household] until it becomes more severe and more difficult to manage”. The children can entangle themselves in gangs and drug abuse without their parents knowing when they spend little time with their parents. Father and mothers in intact families can take turn to look after their children as they have lesser workload to do when they can divide the work together, whereas in broken family, fathers and mothers need to work individually to earn for a living, leaving their children with less guidance.
Some parents are fighting for their children which in the end up dividing the time equally and make the children move weekly from one to another house. It is depressing for the children to be treated as objects. In an interview in the article “Joint Physical Custody Creates Problems for Children”, a 14 year old said, “If you're constantly moving you feel a bit lonely”. They feel lonely because they have two lives at a time and they often jumble up their different lives at different houses as another child complained, “I was getting mixed up about who I was”. Moreover each person has different parenting styles which often confuse the children. Mother and father treat their children differently and it tortures the children as a mother said, “it's all very well having their dad do things differently if it's once a month, as a treat, but living two completely opposite lifestyles tore the children in half”. They need to adjust to the parenting styles every week, the cycle that frequently happen is enjoying the freedom for one week in one house and back to another strict home regulation in another.
Beyond what is visible at the moment, people are unable to see the long-term effect of divorce that might disturb people’s healthiness. According to a study in Chicago it involves “8,652 people aged 51 to 61 found divorced people have 20% more chronic illnesses such as cancer than those who never marry”. It is more than just psychological problem which can be cured with time. The stress, depression and pressure from the divorce situation can damage people’s health. Moreover, remarry will not prevent and cure the diseases. According to an article “Divorce takes health toll that remarriage can't heal” in CNN news website, they “found that divorced or widowed people have 20 percent more chronic health conditions such as heart disease, diabetes or cancer than married people”. Unlike psychological problem that can be cured by remarriage, the psychological pressures from the situation itself create health problems in the future which is incurable.
Similar to many issues, there are many ways to see them. Beyond the disadvantages, people argue that divorce can be a good solution. When the studies show that divorce might make the children end up being delinquents, people oppose it by finding out that most of the massive destructions of children come even before the parents divorce and those children belong to a non harmony family where their parents fight frequently. A friend of mine admit that she prefer her parents to separate rather than fighting every night which makes her cannot feel at home. Fighting parents might render the children to frustration state and do not feel at home thus they will go out and find the place where they can feel better. Unfortunately, often times they find wrong places and commit to gangs. Intact family is not a guarantee to a peaceful home which can prevent the psychology destruction of the children. In this case, divorce can be the best solution for the children because they can have a more peaceful home when they parents are not together.
It is a very difficult option of parents to make when it comes to marriage. When a husband or wife creates troubles for the family and there is no way to stop it, divorce can be a good choice. I have a friend whose father couldn’t keep his faith in the marriage and did polygamy, rendering her mother to a deep state of depression which cause the children to be abandoned. She couldn’t do anything as everything she did will cause her to suffer from physical abuse from her husband. The law in my country, Indonesia, is not strong enough to help her from the abuse. The tremendous affliction that she carried all these time made her felt the anticlimax which caused her to give up on her children and didn’t want to do anything. Thus her mother relinquished the family, including her children because of the pain that she felt for years and years. The youngest son went rebellious seeing his mother didn’t care about him. The children have no role model in their lives to have a father who rarely went home and a mother who locked herself in the room abandoning her children. Money is not a problem for this family and keeping the marriage and divorce will only differ in the financial status. Her mother will need to work and earn for a living if she divorce and rearing three children by herself is not an easy thing. Moreover, whatever she does will not result in a better financial status than she is right now when her husband is supporting her life. If the case come to a point where neither divorce nor keeping the marriage work, what should parents do? In either divorcing or keeping the marriage, the couples have to change themselves. If the mother knows that she will not survive when she divorces she should accept her husband’s infidelity and stop mourning over her life. If she chooses to divorce then she should consider the opportunity cost of divorcing.
In general, it is impossible to find a smooth marriage without obstacle. Wisely, parents have to be selfless for their children but keep striving for their own happiness and this is when their most difficult question of their lives arises. What action should they take? Divorcing but gambling their children’s happiness? Or keep their marriage but have no peace at home? As we can see, impacts from divorcing are a lot more than the impacts of keeping the marriage. Parents have to consider prudently the cost and benefit and wisely choose which path to take. So which path will you take?