Children need married parents
No matter how often we may sympathize with divorce, the exceptions prove the rule of what children need from their parents
Divorce has always been a big part of my life. After all, I spent all but the first year of my life with separated and then divorced parents.
My initial impression of marriage was always inextricably linked with its potential to end, and my childhood defined by the living arrangements I was required to have because of my parents’ divorce.
Over the years, I’ve obviously spent a lot of time considering the moral implications of divorce as well as the reasons society usually says we “need” divorce.
To these reasons, I am not remotely unsympathetic. Far from it. We need protections for women who are abused or neglected within marriage, as well as men who suffer real abuse and mistreatment by their wives.
I did, however, spend a long time after my initial conversion to Christianity believing that when a person left their marriage, it was because they simply didn’t try hard enough or believe in lifelong marriage devoutly enough.
Life, as it happens, has proven me wrong here. Maturity is realizing that your starry-eyed ideals don’t always explain things that happen in real life, to real people.
I know now from many years of experience that oftentimes someone might leave a marriage because the other spouse has already walked away from their vows.
Children need married parents, which means they need parents who are committed to marriage.
The parent who seeks separation because their spouse is unrepentantly and abjectly neglecting these vows is not the reason the marriage broke. It was broken already when they decided to walk away.
Yes, divorce is often complicated and the reasons why people separate are not always objectively all one person’s fault.
And to be clear, I do morally oppose divorce. That doesn’t mean I blame the woman who walks away from the man who beats her or refuses to stop cheating on her, or that I blame the man who walks away from the woman who never apologizes and never takes responsibility for her own actions.
I’ve now known enough people who have gotten divorced to know that one spouse sometimes simply can’t help it if the other spouse is not maintaining the marriage and openly refuses to do so.
This sometimes won’t change, and whether someone believes in moral divorce does not change the fact that the marriage is already broken, and sometimes a couple can no longer live together as husband and wife without perpetuating a system that is cruel and wrong.
And yet, children still need married parents. Even if they do not and cannot realistically have them.
This is still their need, and they still will be impacted by the choices their parents make.
It doesn’t mean that children are doomed for the rest of their life; every single human being can take the cards they’ve been dealt in life and make wise decisions that honor their human dignity and that of others.
Those of us who grew up with divorced parents may very well have been blessed in many ways by (as was my case) a loving extended stepfamily that treated us like one of their own, parents who prioritized our well-being and made us feel important, and the resources to heal and build healthier relationships in our own adult life than the ones we were spawned from.
We still needed married parents. It still would have been better to have two parents who were committed to staying married and making it work. Because this is what children need. Not one spouse willing to hang on when the other has dishonored them without regret. Two parents who will always regret it when they mistreat their spouse, and who will keep working to make it right.
The institution of marriage is referred to “matrimony” because it is the “making of a mother.” Marriage produces children, and exists as a sacred, mysterious, and yet still extremely practical and sorely needed institution for the production and cultivation of the next generation of spouses.
This is why traditional marriage and family piety are the foundation of civil society, of moral society. It is the nucleus in which we learn to live with others.
We are all born of the most intimate act that two human beings can engage in, and this is why Christian society has historically and rightly seen the institution of marriage as being so sacred.
Even secular biologists contend that we live for the primary purpose of reproduction; creating a human person together is the most amazing thing human beings can do, and it is the principle point of all human life.
This is at the center of everything I’m always saying when I’m refuting feminism or defending traditional marriage.
It is not because I harken back to an era when feelings were repressed and human life seemed more strictly orderly. Life was still messy, chaotic, and human back then, and certainly many people through history have suffered sorely within marriage. We simply can’t deny that.
But what we also can’t deny is the purpose of marriage and the need children have to exist within a loving one.
Every single time this is denied a child, it proves the child’s need to have married parents.
This is a hill I will forever die on, since I’ll never go back to trying to convince myself that it was “fine” for my parents to not be married as I grew up.
I lived, learned, and had my own children, and that’s when I discovered how much I needed my husband, and how much my children needed me to be able to depend on him.
We’ve had our ups and downs and at times even felt like we were walking through hell itself trying to make a relationship that inherently requires selflessness to work for two people whose own inherent needs can often feel, to one another, like selfishness.
This has become the greatest learning experience I’ve ever had and has resulted in love that dwarfs the fuzzy butterflies that I always thought as a teenager would be the defining mark of a good relationship.
But the culture we grew up in very much lied to us:
Good relationships don’t always make you feel good. They require you to be good. Which is feels exponentially better than butterflies in the long run.
At the end of the day, not everyone can assure that their spouse will meet this requirement for marriage and parenting. But it is always within our power to do so ourselves, whether we or our children have what they really need. God will always meet us where the world stops short of meeting our needs.
But His ideal for the human family will always and forever remain the same.
Children need married parents.
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This article resonates from beginning to end. Thank you for addressing this topic so fairly and thoughtfully.
Thank you!! Marriage is the root, the core, the source. My parents never should have married. I knew that even as a kid. But they stuck it out. The only reason I have my son is because I married a man worth that commitment. Risk and commitment. That’s what it’s all about. Children are worth all of it.