Parent Time

When Jane Harris* first met her partner at an Edmonton karate class 11 years ago, she was taken with his good looks and thoughtful, intelligent manner. "David seemed like a very gentle person," she recalls. "He wasn't a macho, beat 'em up, tough guy like so many of the men at the club. He was intellectual in his style."

The passionate pair of martial artists started dating about a year later. "Karate was pretty much our entertainment," says Harris. "We trained hard three or four times a week, and after we'd go out alone or with a group for dinner or a few beers. And at home we spent a lot of time just talking - about ourselves, about relationships."

Before long they started their own karate school, forming a perfect partnership - Harris, with her outgoing personality, handling business matters and customer service, and David, with his quiet, methodical style, keeping students coming back to class. The sideline business gave them a shared sense of purpose. They were a team.

But when Harris gave birth to their first daughter, Samantha, everything changed. The teamwork didn't carry into parenthood. "He abandoned me. That's what it felt like," she says. "I felt overwhelmed and he wasn't there for me." Harris had waited until 37 to start a family, and held strong feminist ideals. She loved being a mother, but when the burden of caring for Samantha and Karen, who came along a year and half later, fell squarely on her shoulders, it rankled.

"The kids would wake up in the night, and he would never offer to get up. If I made him, he'd be totally useless," says Harris. "There were times when I was on the edge of collapse because I was so tired. Everybody else in my life could see that I was in trouble, but he was living with me and he didn't offer once. Or I'd be trying to cook a meal and Samantha would start to cry. He'd be sitting in the living room watching TV and he would sit there like he didn't hear her. So I'd be trying to carry a baby on one hip and cook a meal with one hand, and I'd just be fuming."

While her career as a counsellor in a health clinic went on hold, David's life remained quite balanced between work, karate and friends. The things that once drew them together were now the source of deep resentment. The couple barely spoke. "If we did, it was like a growl," she says. When she tried to talk to him about the problem, the conversation went nowhere. "It just seemed too hopeless," she says. "Nothing I said or did made any difference and we'd just come back to the same place of yelling and saying mean things."

Harris wrestled with leaving him. At first it seemed like the answer to all her problems. "I felt that being on my own would be easier in most ways. Having him around made things worse because I was so angry and that made me harder on the kids." But despite her disappointment and, at times, utter contempt for her spouse, she decided to stick it out for the sake of the girls. "When I didn't put them in the picture at all and thought of leaving David, I had a sense of relief. But when I included them I felt a tremendous sadness because they love their dad and deserve to be with him. He's their father and I wanted them to know him."

Harris feels good about providing her girls, now five and four, with a two-parent home and stability. "But I'm still not sure I'm doing the right thing because I know you learn about relationships from what you see when you're growing up." While things have gotten better between them now that the kids aren't so young and she's been able to return to work part-time, it's not the demonstrative and loving partnership she dreamed of providing as an example for the girls. "I'm sacrificing myself for them and I'm not sure it's healthy to teach them that that's what women are supposed to do."

She is hardly alone in her quest for the answer to the question, "Should you stay together for the kids?" In a country where about 31 percent of marriages end in divorce, it's the cause of sleepless nights and agonizing kitchen-table conversations coast to coast.

The experts sit in two camps. Some, like California psychologist Judith Wallerstein, say the negative effects of divorce haunt children well into adulthood. Wallerstein created a stir last year when she co-authored a damning report, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study. Others, like renowned psychologist and BC native E. Mavis Hetherington, say most kids whose parents divorce bounce back within two years. Those in this camp say living in a high-conflict intact family is at least as bad for children, if not worse, than having divorced parents. Frustrated by this contradictory research? Join the club. If you turned here looking for an answer to this gut- wrenching question, you won't find it in black and white. There is no simple answer, no multiple-choice quiz you can do and then tally your results. You can probably find an expert to support any view, someone whose research you can cling to as you make the hardest decision of your life. But one thing is certain: Dissolving your relationship will have a huge impact on your children, and that's a responsibility no parent can take lightly.

Harris's problems with her partner are at the heart of many modern-day marital struggles. Just try to maintain a romantic connection in the face of countless diaper changes, long nights, fights over toys, car-pool shifts and ear infections. Even the strongest couples can have trouble remembering what brought them together in the dark moments when parenthood seems so isolating and the pace of life so maddening. Exacerbating the problem, says Wallerstein, is our increasingly optimistic view of what marriage should be. People raising children today enter their relationships with much higher expectations than their parents and grandparents. Today we expect friendship, love, sexual satisfaction and equality. While these are great things to strive for, they are also harder to achieve. "Divorce is necessary, but perhaps we believe too much in the Hollywood perfection of marriage and that divorce will solve everything," says York University sociology professor Anne-Marie Ambert. "A marriage is just like human nature: It's not going to be perfect."

If the quest for the perfect relationship leads many people to divorce, Wallerstein believes they overestimate their children's abilities to cope. She debunks the long-held theory that the major impact of divorce occurs during childhood or adolescence. The 131 children she followed from the time their parents first broke up (starting in the 1970s) faced the biggest consequence of divorce when it came to forging their own long-term relationships. "When these young people reached adulthood, they were very frightened that they would go down the same path their parents had gone down and that their relationships would fail," says Wallerstein. Some dashed headlong into destructive marriages in a desperate attempt to compensate for their parents' lost love; others avoided relationships altogether. Even kids who appeared to be coping well with their parents' separation in childhood and adolescence experienced a "sleeper effect" of divorce long after their parents had moved on with their lives. New York author Stephanie Staal writes about this in her book The Love They Lost: Living with the Legacy of Our Parents' Divorce: "As I got older, the prospect of love and loss - the hurt of a failed relationship or possible rejection from a partner - sent me into a tailspin. It wasn't until I was struggling through my own personal attachments as an adult that the fallout from my parents' breakup began to become apparent." But the effects can be much more immediate, too, starting with denial and bewilderment when the children learn about the pending breakup. Kids don't draw the same conclusions as adults about the need for a divorce, says Wallerstein. Remarkably, they don't connect fighting - or even physical abuse or alcoholism - with a parent's need to leave. Besides, "a lot of couples that divorce do not have conflict in the home," she says. "Most of the conflict arises as they face those last issues of custody and money."

York University's Ambert concurs. Her research shows that in 66 percent of divorces there was no prior sustained conflict in front of the children. She says these children gain nothing from divorce - no escape from constant bickering, no refuge from violence. They no longer live with both parents and often have to move to a less comfortable environment, leaving behind friends and familiar surroundings. Many experience a sharp decline in economic circumstances. "At all age levels, on average, children of divorced parents have higher rates of emotional, behavioural, social and academic problems than children in two-parent families," says Ambert.

There are powerful exceptions to every generalization about divorce, though. Jason Gillingham*, a father from a small southwestern Ontario town, believes his divorce has been good for his daughter Alexandra. After "exhausting all options" for reconciling with his ex-wife, the two split three years ago when Alexandra was five. The unhappiness in their household was palpable, he says, and Alexandra was becoming withdrawn and nervous. Today she's "very social, very energetic" and does well in school, says Gillingham. "It's just a complete turnaround."

His point of view is supported by psychologists like E. Mavis Hetherington, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. Like Wallerstein, she conducted long-term studies of divorcing families starting in the 1970s. But Hetherington concluded that children are not irreparably harmed by marital breakup. While children in divorced families on average experienced more long-term problems than kids in intact families, by no means are they doomed. According to her research, about 25 percent of the children of divorce suffer enduring difficulties compared with ten percent of children whose parents stay together. "Our study shows that competent kids can develop in most any family," she told The New York Times last year. "The most important thing is that the parenting has to be good."

Rhonda Freeman, the founding director of Families In Transition - a Toronto non-profit organization that helps families who are separating, divorcing or remarrying - says that much of how children fare is determined by the ability of parents to co-operate for the sake of their children. She encourages parents to approach co-parenting like a business partnership, where two people who don't particularly enjoy each other can use complementary skills to run a successful venture - in this case, parenting. "You may have different skills and abilities, and why shouldn't your children benefit from both?"

Freeman says it's not the legal event that predicts the outcome for kids, but how parents respond to the related stresses and challenges. "It's a loss for the children and they need the time and psychological freedom to mourn that loss," she says. "They need the freedom to have relationships with both parents. They must not feel caught in a loyalty conflict or be burdened by a parent's distress. Children need the freedom to remain children."

Sharon Rohan*, a Toronto mom, has an enviably amicable relationship with her ex, Dan. The two meet and talk on the phone regularly to discuss how Rachel, six, and Jonathan, three, are doing. She and Dan share the kids almost 50-50, occasionally get together for special events and greet each other with a hug when he comes to the door to get the kids. So far the children appear to be coping well. "They're always really excited to see the other parent, so they're not upset to leave." A little over a year ago, Sharon realized that she and Dan had married more "as a logical progression" than out of true love. "I wasn't being true to myself and it became about that and not about the kids. What manifested in me was I snapped a lot more; I was less patient. I'm a much better person now that I'm not in the marriage and that can only be good for the kids." Even though hers seems a model separation, Sharon isn't resting on her laurels. Rachel asks some pretty probing questions about why her parents split up, and Sharon is fully prepared that their seemingly smooth transition may hit bumpy spots later on. Freeman says she's smart to keep on the lookout. Divorce is far more than an event that occurs over a period of months or a year, she says. "It's a developmental process that unfolds over time."

Three years ago, Kristyn and Derek Driver, of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, briefly thought about divorce. But during a six-month separation, they sought counselling to see if they could make it work. "We decided the boys needed their parents together more than anything else," says Kristyn. Their youngest, Glenn, was just six months old at the time of their separation, but three-year-old Evan was definitely aware that something was missing, says Driver. Both she and Derek grew up in happy families and they wanted their boys to have the same stable upbringing that they enjoyed. "I believe kids need both parents, and I felt it was important my kids have that."

Counselling has helped them make that possible for their children. It took "a lot of tears," she says, but the experience showed them how to reconnect. "I think the most important thing we learned was that we had to set aside a time for us as a couple, not just sitting together in the living room watching TV after the kids go to bed.

"After we had children, we got talking to the kids and not each other," she reflects. "With the counselling we re-learned how to communicate and got to know each other better. We came to understand how our everyday actions affect each other." Now, for instance, she "wouldn't run down and turn the TV off in the middle of the hockey game that he's watching and say we have to talk about this now." Instead they pick appropriate times for discussion when they are both in the right mood, and they choose their words carefully.

They've also set aside time for regular dates - nothing extravagant, just lots of long walks and chats at coffee shops, the things they enjoyed in their childless years. Today she believes their bond is strong enough to last after the kids are grown.

York's Ambert says many marriages are salvageable, like the Drivers'. Her research found that about one-third of divorces were "useless"; in other words, the spouses said their marriages weren't that bad. In 13 percent of the divorced couples, both ex-partners described the marriage as "fairly happy to very happy," or a four or five on a five-point scale.

So what happened? "People gave up too quickly," she says. "Once people start talking about divorcing, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and it is very difficult to stay. It keeps getting bigger and bigger."

Well then, should you stay together for the kids? "There definitely are some who should stay together," says Ambert. "Probably in a third of cases divorces are unnecessary and the kids are big losers. But if the marriage is really bad and the children see that it is and, of course, if there is any abuse, they should not stay together." Wallerstein concurs that no one should endure an abusive or openly hostile relationship. But what about run-of-the-mill marital disappointment? Only you can know if you have it in you to try to weather periods where you're just not in love with your spouse any more. But Wallerstein says parents should ask themselves if they can still parent with their partner. If the answer is yes, perhaps they should give serious thought to sticking it out.

For now, Jane Harris is trying to come to grips with the reality that what's best for the kids may not seem best for her, at least not immediately. "I know what needs to be done in order to save the relationship," she says. "I need to forgive David for all the ways I feel he has wronged me since we had the kids. If I can find a way to do that, then we can start again and just deal with the little things as they come along."

She takes heart in knowing that her sisters went through similar struggles when their children were small. All three are much more happily married today, largely because they've made it past that all-consuming, fatiguing, little-kid stage and can find time to rediscover the things that drew them to their spouses in the first place. "It's not the wonderful, romantic, happily-ever-after thing you hope for in life," says Harris. "But while the kids are with me, what's important is to do what's best for them. The hard part is knowing what that is."

*Families' names changed by request.

A Primer on Divorce

Divorce in Canada began to increase significantly after 1968, when Canada's first unified divorce laws were created. Until then, a person could only sue for divorce if he or she could prove adultery; now a claim of marriage breakdown (defined as living separate and apart for three years) would be enough. Between 1968 and 1987, divorce increased sevenfold, reaching its highest point in our history. Since then it has levelled off at a lower rate - about 31 percent.

Why the 1987 peak? This followed the introduction of the 1985 Divorce Act of Canada, which collapsed the required waiting period to establish marriage breakdown from three years of separation to one year. Some say this coincided with the "me ethos" of the 1980s, but it may also be that these divorcees were the first to get married after the stigma of divorce was gone. Whatever the reason, the '80s brought an end to an era when the choices were simply to endure a loveless marriage to the end of life or face public vilification.

In May 2002, Justice Minister Anne McLellan is expected to amend the Divorce Act based on recommendations from the Special Joint Committee on Child Custody and Access. These changes will likely aim to shift the focus of the family law system from parental rights to parental responsibilities, promote more involvement for non-custodial parents, and replace the terms custody and access with the more child-focused concept of "parenting plans."

August 2001