Brent Rinehart www.apparentstuff.com 23 Feb 2021
In the 1990s, Nicholas Wolfinger, a sociologist and professor at the University of Utah, began studying the connection between a parent’s divorce and their children’s future marriages.
What he found was this: children of divorce are more likely to get divorced themselves than are people from intact families. Also, people with divorced parents are far more likely to marry other people with divorced parents—and couples in which both partners are children of divorce are even more likely to get divorced.
All of us are impacted by divorce. If not our own marriages or parents, we have family members and friends with broken marriages. I’ve known people with parents who have gone through numerous divorces. I had one friend in college who, between her parents and step-parents, had nearly 10 divorces among them.
How is a child supposed to learn about love and marriage in that environment?
Like sponges, our children are absorbing everything about marriage and relationships, based on what they see in us as parents.
A study published by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that the quality of a child’s parents’ marriage had as much influence on his or her future mental and physical health and well-being as his or her own relationship with either parent.
In other words, the marriage relationship has as much impact on a child as the parent-child relationship.
Understanding this–that the success or failure of the marriage–will have long-term effects on the child should cause us to reflect and ask the right questions. What are my children learning from my marriage?
See the 4 things they should learn: What Do You Want Your Kids to Learn from Your Marriage? – Christian Parenting (crosswalk.com)