They Say: Kids Might Not Doom A Marriage

Good news parents! A new study says the old studies that blamed our marital discord on our decision to have kids were one parent hooey, one part truth.

In other words – twenty-five separate studies that said the quality of marriage drops significantly after “baby makes three,” were too vague. They lumped us all together.

The hooey? University of California at Berkeley researchers Philip and Carolyn Cowan, will soon make a presentation to the Council on Contemporary
Families asserting that never before did researchers account for the parents who had an accidental pregnancy or who had disagreed before conception about whether both spouses actually wanted children.

Think about it. If one parent wants kids and the other doesn’t, shouldn’t it stand to reason that the arrival of said kid is going to make one spouse unhappy? And one unhappy spouse generally makes for an unhappy marriage. Say the Cowans, “couples who planned or equally welcomed the conception were likely to maintain or even increase their marital satisfaction after the child was born.”

The problem with most studies are the broad, sweeping generalisations, and parenting studies are no different. A rock-solid marriage will likely struggle after the birth of a child – parents are sleepless, therefore parents are stressed. Throw in say a sick child or a job loss (we have a lot of those these days), and who knows what might happen. But is that the fault of having kids? No. It might be kid-related, but not the fault of the decision to procreate or adopt.

In my personal experience, I know parents who had the “oops pregnancy” and rushed to get married who have now found the marriage is on the rocks. I also know a couple who were divorced within two years of their son’s birth because they had an oops pregnancy during marriage – and he wasn’t crazy about it. But my colleagues here on the ‘derby say they know couples who were fine… until they had the second child. That’s when life went haywire and the divorce man cometh.

So what to do, what to do? In her New York Times op-ed on the subject, Stephanie Coontz refers to psychologist Joshua Coleman suggestion: the airline warning to put on your own oxygen mask before you place one on your child also holds true for marriage.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

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