You are soooooo Correct...Good Post!
Last paragraph especially = perfect. Thanks for the post.
My analogy is spot on.
Children are created by a mother and a father, and they need and want a mother and a father. Fear of the unknown has nothing to do with why kids don't want their parents to divorce. Its pure and fundamental, kids get it, even if their parents don't. They know they were made to have a father and a mother in their lives and there for them no matter what. Even OOW children who have never met their fathers KNOW THIS. To say kid's don't want divorce because they "fear the unknown" is absolute hogwash. Even adults, whos parents divorced, more often than not when ask will say they wished their parents had stayed married.... That's not the statement of someone fearing the unknown, but a fundamental and inalienable fact of the human experience. You can try to reason it away with platitudes, but it doesn't wash.
There is no doubt OOW children have problems, but you are naive if you think children of divorce don't have a lot of the same issues, even if it doesn't put them in jail they still have them. When that teenage girl winds up pregnant because she's doing anything for male attention... when the teenage boy rebels against his mother because she drove his dad off.. you think he's any less likely to have problems? When a kid is being exposed to whoever is their parents boy friends or girlfriends and all the extra nonsense that brings...
Children who lose a parent to death, particularly death after they are old enough to have some real understanding of it, are the least likely to have the problems of other children in a single parent (particularly mother) household. There is a reason for that too... Daddy's not home because he can't be.. not because he doesn't love me, need me, care for me, or because mommy's got a new boyfriend, or daddy's got a new girlfriend thats taking up all his time... etc etc etc. Kids get it, even if adults and parents may want to rationalize it away.
The fact remains when you have children, they are the focus, period. And often in divorce situations they are the last ones being thought of. Mom's mad and wants to hurt dad, because dad cheated... dad's pissed because mom took the kids and ran off... mom fights with dad every time they meet, Mom and Dad use kids as pawns in their power play and retribution attempts... Kids hear mom badmouth their father repeatatively, kids hear dad badmouth their mother repeatitively.... Kids become pawns of court battles that have little if anything to do with them, and the parents act like 2 year olds.
I have said repeatedly the ONLY reasons for divorce are real abuse and neglect, everything else is selfishness... I've said it MANY MANY TIMES on this thread, so spending a paragraph to repeat what I have already stated to be justifiable seems rather foolish.
I agree completely with your post #170...I knew a woman who endured years of emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her husband...no one can tell me that she and her two boys were better off staying with this bum...she stayed with him for so long, because she tried to live her Catholic faith, and was opposed to divorce...
But after a number of broken bones, and watching her two boys become more and more unstable, she figured enough was enough, and she divorced this husband...a few years later she met a wonderful man, who adored her, and loved her two boys...my friend married this man, had a wonderful marriage with him, and the two of them were able to help her two boys heal...
Best thing she ever did was get a divorce from her first husband...if she had stayed with him, she probably would have wound up beaten to death, and her two boys were be mentally impaired for the rest of their lives...
Divorce should never be entered into lightly...but there are times, , when divorce is the only true rational course to take...