Parents mess up their children. As sure as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, this is an inevitable fact of life. The best ones do it and the worst ones do it even more. Therefore, the measure of a parent’s success can’t really be attributed to whether they have given their kids emotional baggage or not, since all of them have and will.   It’s tough busi...

Parents mess up their children. As sure as the sun rises in the East and sets in the West, this is an inevitable fact of life. The best ones do it and the worst ones do it even more. Therefore, the measure of a parent’s success can’t really be attributed to whether they have given their kids emotional baggage or not, since all of them have and will.

It’s tough business raising a kid, and everyone is learning as they go, always trying to do right by them. Perhaps that’s where the problem lies however, when parents decide to stay in an unhappy marriage for the sake of the kids. The mantra of doing right by one’s children is an honorable code of life but can sometimes be counter-intuitively blinding.

Here’s why divorce can be good for children:

Parents are role models for their children. This perhaps isn’t exactly the most profound and novel idea ever, but it’s something parents tend to lose sight of. One can’t behave in one way, tell their children to act in another, and expect for it to work. This is a recipe for disaster. One of the most obvious examples of this would be when both parents smoke, and tell their children not to. If the child is exceptionally intelligent and mature, then maybe, just maybe if they’re an exception, they won’t smoke.

However, this idea runs even deeper than the body. If a child is around an unhappy marriage, no matter how well disguised it is, they will pick up on it. This can have serious repercussions when they grow older in terms of how they themselves approach life. When parents martyr themselves in the name of their kids, it sends all sorts of distorted messages to the child.

First, it places an unreasonable amount of invisible pressure for the child to be happy. They will feel as though it is an obligation, after all isn’t that why their parents stayed together? Keeping talks of divorce under wraps is harder than you think, and the idea of “staying together for the kids” is something that they will inevitably pick up on. The pressure to be an emotional anchor for a family is an incredibly unfair burden to place on a child.

It can also distort how they will approach relationships in the future. An unhappy marriage rears its head constantly, and amid the fights, tension, and distaste the child will see two people continuously failing to make each other happy. This in turn can create a complex for the child, causing him to be overly concerned with pleasing his or her significant other. Suffocating one’s significant other is a sure way to chase them in the other direction, and a large issue for the child to have to overcome.

Getting divorced and finding happiness on the other hand tells the child the opposite of all of these things. It says that happiness is an end in itself worth pursuing no matter what. It says that in order to be a good parent, they have the responsibility to take care of themselves first. Finally it teaches them that in order to be a good boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, or wife, they have to be happy with their own lives first. Happiness and well-being are the keys to everything in life. This is the number one lesson parents are obligated to teach their kids, and there is no better method of teaching than exemplary behavior.