Greater Good

The other day Molly, my nearly-seven-year-old, whacked her sister playfully, but too hard. Like a puppy, she recoiled when she realized her mistake, feeling embarrassed because Fiona's cool third-grade friends witnessed the gaff and were commenting. (She's very self-conscious about seeming like the "baby" sister.)

"Don't be embarrassed," I said to Molly, thinking I was being extra growth-mindset. "It's okay to make mistakes so long as you apologize and learn from them.

"Sorry I hit you, Fiona," Molly said, red in the face.

Hating to see Molly uncomfortable over what to me was nothing, I again told her not to feel embarrassed. But I shouldn't have. Not only is it an emotion-coaching no-no to tell kids how to feel—or that they shouldn't feel something they are already feeling—but it turns out that embarrassment is a good thing.

Research shows that people who blush are judged more favorably than those who don't in the face of a mistake. People understand that when someone is blushing they are feeling embarrassment or shame, and they take this as a sincere acknowledgement of wrongdoing, a sign that they won't make the same mistake again. Researchers believe that this is adaptive socially—that it could prevent people from being excluded from their group.

So Molly knew what she was doing by blushing after her faux pas. Next time I'll say, "It's okay to be embarrassed, Molly. Did you know that blushing is actually a good thing?"

To read more about the study cited here, see this Greater Good research brief or Greater Good Executive Editor Dacher Keltner's May essay.

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What IS this posting, you ask? In preparing for our big website relaunch in early 2010, we are experimenting with new types of content on Half Full: Science for Raising Happy Kids. "The Takeaway" is what I as a parent takeaway from research that is posted on the Greater Good Magazine blog. Let us know what you think.

© 2009 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

Selected reference:

Dijk, C., De Jong, P. J., Peters, M. L. (2009). "The remedial value of blushing in the context of transgressions and mishaps." Emotion, 9(2), 287-291.

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Thank you for all of the thoughtful and heartfelt comments last week regarding the question of whether or not to stay in a marriage once children are involved. Nancy Prisby had a very important clarification about conflict and what isn't good for children:

I just want to comment on the statement "Parental conflict is not good for children's happiness." I would change it to "Acting on the anger/strong emotions that result from parental conflict is not good for children's happiness." This is why: Shying away from conflict and putting on a facade that everything is always OK provides a disservice for children. Conflict is part of life and inherent in human relationships. If we can work to manage strong emotions and model how to work through some of it, this is helpful. Of course, many adult conflicts are better left unseen/unheard by children. At the same time, we can teach by modeling, "We're having a disagreement, I need to calm down first and then talk about it."

I completely agree with this comment, and in fact have blogged about why conflict is, in fact, a good thing in many contexts . I've also blogged about how to fight with your co-parent in a way that is constructive. And as Chris Cicchetti points out,

parental conflict is not good for kids whether or not the parents are married. Seems like one question to ask might be: Will getting a divorce really reduce the conflict between us? Once you have kids, it's not like you can get a divorce and just walk away from the person and have no more contact. (Well, OK, it's possible, but we are talking about what is good for the kids here, and obviously that isn't!) Will there really be less fighting, or will a contentious marriage become a contentious divorce?

And will a contentious divorce lead to co-parenting that is even more contentious than it was in the marriage? Although a divorce might temporarily increase conflict, will this increased conflict last? Or do you think that you will get along better with less contact (post-divorce)? Are you the type of couple that is good at working together to make parenting decisions? Will divorce increase or decrease the conflict you experience in your co-parenting?

Sofia raised several more issues that I will address in future postings on divorce:

Clearly from the many moving comments and emails I received this week, there are a lot of readers struggling with this question. Ana sums up what a lot of readers seem to be going through:

What a question! I am currently struggling with it myself. I watched my own parents struggle and I always told myself that I would never do that, never stay in a relationship just for my kids. Now, here I am in my parents' shoes and is such a tough decision to make. Although my parents had their fair share of issues, their relationship was never the abusive kind. I guess it was somehow easy for me to say "mom, why do you not divorce him?" My husband comes from a divorced family, and I can tell you it was not fun for him. But where is that breaking point where you decide that it no longer works? When do you stop fighting and trying? Is having an abusive relationship the only thing that should count on getting divorce? How about loneliness, feeling like furniture in a house, emptiness and abandonment? Is it really going to be better with someone else? These are all questions I find myself constantly trying to answer. Luckily, my parents have overcome a lot of their issues and they seem happier than ever. I do not know if that will be my case or not but at least it shows me that there could be a light at the end of the tunnel.

Thank you for contributing to this dialogue! Let's keep the discussion going.

© 2009 Christine Carter, Ph.D.

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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.

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!

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