Should We Stay Together for the Kids?

Last night, one of my best friends called my cell phone twice in one minute—our signal for distress, the indication that I needed to pick up the phone right then, even if I was in the middle of dinner. I’d gotten previous distress calls when she found a suspicious lump (the biopsy was, thank goodness, benign) and when her daughter was in an accident. I knew that whatever was coming on the other line wasn’t good.

“He is SO MEAN TO ME,” she sobbed into the phone. “It’s the same crap year after year after year. I’m at that breaking point where it doesn’t seem sane to continue to take it.”

Oh boy: I hadn’t seen that coming. This is the friend whose marriage sustains my (perhaps delusional) romantic belief in matrimony—the marriage I point to as evidence that big love, deep connections, and truly equal partnerships are, in fact, possible.

But here she was struggling with the same question I’ve wrestled with for years: is it better for our kids if we stay in less-than-happy marriages?

Holy cow, is that a big question. And if you’ve ever seriously asked it, you know it can be an agonizing one. In the coming weeks, I’ll be blogging about how I’ve answered this question for myself.

I know it’s tempting to answer the question of whether or not we should stay together for the kids with a simple “yes.” As a society we tend to think that kids will do better if parents stay together; that’s what our grandparents’ generation did, or tried to do. A mediocre marriage is better for kids than no marriage, right? We might believe this at least partly because of a hugely flawed—but very influential and well-publicized—study by Judith Wallerstein that “showed” that kids don’t notice that their parents are unhappy in a marriage. Wallerstein argued that unless domestic violence is a part of the picture, kids are worse off when parents divorce.

Thinking that an unhappy marriage is better than no marriage—whether the belief comes from our family or religion or a study like Wallerstein’s—has kept a lot of unhappily married Americans in their marriages. The study, by the way, while embraced by the press and published as a New York Times-bestselling book, has been rejected whole-heartedly by social scientists because Wallerstein didn’t use a random sample of families that had divorced or stayed married; instead, she looked at a group of divorced people with mental health problems. Her study doesn’t meet accepted standards of scientific research, and its findings shouldn’t be generalized to families that aren’t struggling with the same things for which Wallerstein’s tiny sample was being treated (usually histories of mental illness, clinical depression, and suicidal tendencies).

Here is what I’ve gleaned from the many good studies I’ve read on the subject: It is the quality of parents’ relationships with each other, rather than whether they are married or single, that matters most for kids’ well-being. Parental conflict isn’t good for children’s happiness, whether or not you are married.

“Studies of two-parent families have consistently found that when a couple’s relationship is characterized by unresolved conflict and unhappiness, their children tend to have more acting out aggressive behavior problems, more shy withdrawn behavior, and fewer social and academic skills,” write UC Berkeley researchers Phil and Carolyn Cowan.

Furthermore, when couples aren’t getting along, their irritation or anger with each other often spills over into their relationships with their children. “Some children get a double whammy,” write the Cowans. They suffer the consequences of both the “heated or frosty emotional tone of their parents’ relationship” and the frequent result of co-parent conflict—“harsh or ineffective patterns of caring and discipline.”

I’ve lived this: When my husband and I would fight, I would have a hard time managing the powerful negative emotions that surfaced—anger, disappointment, hurt—while trying to keep Fiona and Molly’s routines on track effectively. And I could usually win all the awards for crappy parenting if I also needed to handle a situation with the kids that required calm, consistent discipline. When I’m already upset, I tend to discipline the kids in a way that is, uh, not calm or collected.

So should you stay together for the kids? It depends on how high-conflict your marriage is, how unhappy you are, and whether or not you can fix these things.

© 2009 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

References:

Cowan, P.A., and C.P. Cowan. “Strengthening Couples to Improve Children’s Well-Being: What We Know Now.” Poverty Research News 6, no. 3 (2002): 18-21.

Morrison, Donna Ruane, and Mary Jo Coiro. “Parental Conflict and Marital Disruption: Do Children Benefit When High-Conflict Marriages Are Dissolved?” Journal of Marriage and the Family 61, no. 3 (1999): 626-37.

Wallerstein, Judith S. The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study. New York: Hyperion, 2001.

So many bloggers talk about this it is hard to know where to start (wish I had time to read them all!). LousySpouse.com is kind of funny, though not too helpful. Penelope Trunk cites the Wallerstein research like it is the last word; it isn’t. Please suggest other websites in the comments!

Holiday Happiness: Is it all About Forgiveness?

As Halloween excitement mounts in our household and the nip of fall is finally forcing us to find our jackets (I know, it is good to be a Californian), one thing is clear: The holidays are right around the corner.

I’m the first to feel annoyed when I see Hallmark Thanksgiving and Christmas stuff in store windows the day after Halloween. But I find the holidays far less stressful if I give them plenty of time and space, both for planning and for enjoying. So forgive me: I’m starting to think about my New Year’s resolutions now.

The holidays are not always the happy time they can be for many people, particularly adults who are disappointed or hurt year after year—that their family isn’t what they want it to be, that they got stuck with all the gift-buying and holiday tasks, that they always do for everyone, everywhere, and no one seems particularly grateful.

Which makes the holidays a fruitful time to think about forgiveness. If we want to feel happy over the holidays, we need to let go of grudges from last year and prevent those same old transgressions from happening again—and in many (often very difficult) cases, anticipate the times we’ll be expected to hold hands with family members who have hurt us.

My point: This holiday season will be a lot happier if we aren’t angry and resentful. And our kids will have more meaningful holidays if they learn to practice gratitude and forgiveness rather than anger and entitlement. I’ve blogged before about how forgiveness is something we do for ourselves, to lead happier lives. I wrote then:

Few people fully realize the huge impact the ability to forgive can have on their happiness, nor do most people think of this as a skill that they need to teach and practice with their children. But important it is: forgiving people tend to be happier, healthier, and more empathetic. Read the rest of this posting on forgiveness.

Teaching Children Skills for Forgiveness

So the holidays are a particularly apt time for us to teach kids the skills they need to become forgiving people. We teach forgiveness when we forgive others because our children learn what we model; we can also teach our children directly how to forgive.

Fred Luskin, the director of the Stanford Forgiveness Project, has spent decades researching and teaching about forgiveness. Luskin emphasizes that forgiveness is not about forgetting, as the adage would have us believe, but about letting go. It is about choosing positive emotions over negative ones; it is a decision that results in an entirely different emotional experience.

Luskin has developed a program to help people learn to forgive even the most heinous acts. I’ve translated his forgiveness program here into skills and concepts we can teach and practice with our kids.

1. A good first step is to help kids develop the ability to understand their emotions and articulate them when something is bothering them. Practice this by asking kids to identify and talk about their feelings, particularly when they are hurting. Kids can learn to talk about their feelings at a very young age.
2. When kids are upset, help them practice mindfulness. This will help turn off their fight or flight response so that they can respond to the upsetting situation more effectively.
3. Another important way to teach forgiveness is simply to talk with kids about how awful we feel when we ruminate about how we’ve been hurt, and remind them of all the positive benefits for ourselves of forgiveness. When kids feel hurt, help them recognize that what they are feeling is distress coming from what they are thinking and feeling right now, not from the original offense, whether it was months or just minutes ago.
4. Teach kids that we suffer when we demand things that other life is not going to give them. They can hope for things, of course, and they can work hard to get what they want. But they cannot force things to happen that are outside of their control. When we expect something outside of our control to happen and then it doesn’t, we feel hurt and wronged. Help kids practice letting go of desire for things they have no influence over, and redirect their energy towards things they do have control over.
5. Talk with your kids about the desire for revenge, and show them that the best revenge is a life well-lived. Explain that when we focus on how we’ve been hurt, we give power to the person who hurt us because it causes us to continue hurting.

Forgiving is tough business. It takes courage and resolve to let go of negative feelings when we’ve been wronged. Fortunately this gets easier with practice—especially if we start with the small stuff and get in the habit early on—and it makes us stronger and better people.

Josh Ruxin is also blogging about forgiveness on The Huffington Post.

© 2009 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

Selected references:

Luskin, Frederic “The Choice to Forgive” Greater Good, 2004, 13-15.

———Forgive for Good. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.

How to Love Bigger, Better, More

Let’s not lie. Despite his controversial views on parenting, I love Michael Lewis. I LOVE his book about parenting, even though much of it goes against what I preach; I love his sense of humor; I love that he predicted the current financial meltdown 20 years before it happened in a book that Thomas Wolfe says is the funniest non-fiction book ever written about Wall Street. I love that Michael Lewis has been writing about corruption in the financial and mortgage industries ever since. The excerpt from Homegame that was printed in the July issue of O, The Oprah Magazine, made me PEE MY PANTS it is so funny. (I’m not kidding: I was alone in bed reading, and I laughed so hard I peed.)

I also cried—albeit a totally different type of tears—when I saw the trailer to the movie The Blind Side, which is based on Michael Lewis’s book of the same title. What I thought was a book about football is a biography of Michael Oher, a homeless African-American kid from the Memphis inner-city who has since risen to football greatness. This story also goes against much of what I preach as a sociologist and firm believer in the growth-mindset, but just watch the trailer and you’ll see what made me cry: that fierce love of Oher’s white, wealthy, Southern spitfire adoptive mother, played by Sandra Bullock.

What made me cry was how much I related to the Sandra Bullock character. I could feel, deep in my bones, the incredible power of her love, the sheer force of it overcoming all notions of class, race—even biological parenthood. I imagine that adoptive parents must feel this all the time.

When I became a parent, my capacity for love grew exponentially. When my first-born, Fiona, arrived, I thought I was going to burst I loved her so much. I was sure that I could never love another human-being as much as I loved her. But then Molly was born, and I realized that I loved her that much, too, and that it didn’t detract from the big love I felt for Fiona. And then the epiphany: I could love others—both adults and children—with the same openness and ferocity. I had become fully aware of how much love I really have to share, and of the incredible power of that love.

Kids may be a pain in the neck sometimes, as Lewis is quick to point out. But they also teach us to love bigger, better, more. And that, I think, is the real key to happiness.

Greed, Games, and Goodness
More evidence that Michael Lewis is not as self-absorbed as he implies: he’s doing a Greater Good Science Center event for us this week. 100% of the money raised by ticket sales will benefit the GGSC and support this blog. In Greed, Games, and Goodness: A Conversation Between Michael Lewis and Dacher Keltner, Lewis and GGSC Faculty Director Keltner will be discussing the state of fatherhood and whether or not it is making women unhappy, among other things.

And depending on which tickets you buy, some of the cost may be tax-deductable! Lewis is donating his time, and all our costs are being underwritten by The Quality of Life Foundation. So please: if you like Half Full and you think the work that we do at the GGSC is important, bring all your friends to our event (if you live in the area), and spread the word to your Bay Area friends (even if you aren’t nearby)!

» Buy your tickets now
» I can’t come, but I’d like to make a donation to support you

See Lewis Live Buy Your Tickets Now Friday, October 23rd, 2009 7:30 pm at the Zellerbach Playhouse UC Berkeley campus Join us for an evening of lively conversation between Michael Lewis and Dacher Keltner. Known for his puckish humor and inimitable commentary, Lewis—author of Liar’s Poker, The Blind Side, and Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood—will talk with Keltner about the economic meltdown, sports, and parenthood. Director of the Greater Good Science Center and author of Born to Be Good, Keltner’s contrasting viewpoint is inspired by his research on happiness, compassion, and altruism. What a pair! Tickets now on sale through Cal Performances Click here to buy now! $150: 6 pm gourmet reception and wine bar, premium seating & copy of signed book $75: Premium seating & copy of signed book $25: General admission Best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis calls it as he sees it. Lewis first made a name for himself in 1989 with the chart-topping Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street, which Tom Wolfe called “the funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read.” In Moneyball, Michael Lewis writes about how the Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane created one of the most cost-effective teams in baseball. Lewis’ The Blind Side will come out as a movie starring Sandra Bullock at the end of October! Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Keltner’s book, Born to Be Good, demonstrates that life is not destined to be “nasty, brutish, and short,” but rather that we humans are hardwired to be good. Keltner has written for The New York Times Magazine and has participated on two scientific panels with the Dalai Lama; his research has been covered in TIME, Newsweek, and on the BBC, CNN, and NPR.

© 2009 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

Are Parents Today Too Needy?

Michael Lewis is worried that now that he isn’t writing about his kids, he isn’t going to pay enough attention to them. To quote Jon Stewart, this is one of the worst things I’ve ever heard a parent admit on national television. He then dismisses his worry with the notion that kids don’t really need to be lavished with attention, anyway. Parents today are too needy, he says. They worry too much that their kids aren’t going to be perfect. His solution? Back off. Many of life’s problems solve themselves, he says, if you just let them be. (And kids fall into the category of life’s problems.)

He May Be Right
For the record, I don’t agree that parents today are too needy, or that the type of parenting Lewis is advocating in this interview on The Daily Show is going to win us any awards for stellar parenting. Nor is it a surefire way to raise happy children. I do think kids develop grit and resilience when parents aren’t so over-bearing, though. And I also know that a lot of unstructured play—in my house known as benign neglect and recognized as those rare moments when I’m not telling my kids exactly how to be or what to do—is good for the soul.

So shocking as his opener is, I think Lewis goes on to be insightful about how kids develop. He asserts both that it is harder to screw kids up than we may think, and also that we are screwing them up in different ways than we assume. His point is that what we as parents SAY has a much smaller effect on kids than how we ourselves ARE. “If you want to change your children, change yourself,” Lewis declares. I couldn’t agree more, which is why I believe that parents need to put their own oxygen mask on first. Kids model themselves after us in the darnedest ways, and we have compelling research that shows that if we want to raise happy children, we’ll do well to model authentic happiness in ourselves. (The same thing is true about raising kind children, of course.)

Greed, Games, and Goodness
More evidence that Michael Lewis is not as self-absorbed as he implies: he’s doing a Greater Good Science Center event for us this month. 100% of the money raised by ticket sales will benefit the GGSC and support this blog. In Greed, Games, and Goodness: A Conversation Between Michael Lewis and Dacher Keltner, Lewis and GGSC Faculty Director Keltner will be discussing the state of fatherhood and whether or not it is making women unhappy, among other things.

And your ticket is tax deductible! Lewis is donating his time, and all our costs are being underwritten by The Quality of Life Foundation. So please: if you like Half Full and you think the work that we do at the GGSC is important, bring all your friends to our event (if you live in the area), and spread the word to your Bay Area friends (even if you aren’t nearby)!

» Buy your tickets now
» I can’t come, but I’d like to make a donation to support you

See Lewis Live Buy Your Tickets Now Friday, October 23rd, 2009 7:30 pm at the Zellerbach Playhouse UC Berkeley campus Join us for an evening of lively conversation between Michael Lewis and Dacher Keltner. Known for his puckish humor and inimitable commentary, Lewis—author of Liar’s Poker, The Blind Side, and Home Game: An Accidental Guide to Fatherhood—will talk with Keltner about the economic meltdown, sports, and parenthood. Director of the Greater Good Science Center and author of Born to Be Good, Keltner’s contrasting viewpoint is inspired by his research on happiness, compassion, and altruism. What a pair! Tickets now on sale through Cal Performances Click here to buy now! $150: 6 pm gourmet reception and wine bar, premium seating & copy of signed book $75: Premium seating & copy of signed book $25: General admission Best-selling author and journalist Michael Lewis calls it as he sees it. Lewis first made a name for himself in 1989 with the chart-topping Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage of Wall Street, which Tom Wolfe called “the funniest book on Wall Street I’ve ever read.” In Moneyball, Michael Lewis writes about how the Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane created one of the most cost-effective teams in baseball. Lewis’ The Blind Side will come out as a movie starring Sandra Bullock at the end of October! Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology and founding faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Keltner’s book, Born to Be Good, demonstrates that life is not destined to be “nasty, brutish, and short,” but rather that we humans are hardwired to be good. Keltner has written for The New York Times Magazine and has participated on two scientific panels with the Dalai Lama; his research has been covered in TIME, Newsweek, and on the BBC, CNN, and NPR.

© 2009 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

E-mail this

RSS feed

Watch video

Subscribe to Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids by Email

Friday Photo 10/9

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
–Martin Luther King, Jr.