Can Divorce Make You a Better Parent?

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Sometimes I wonder what it’s like for my kids, having parents who are married. I have very few memories of my parents as a couple. They broke up when I was 9 and I only remember relating to them individually. Dealing with two parents at once must be kind of intense, right? Two whole different personalities, bearing down on you simultaneously? I’ve read about it in novels and sometimes, it seems kind of cute. Everyone kind of teasing each other, right? Exaggerated yet loving eye rolls, things of that nature. Last month, I read Catherine Newman’s novel Sandwich, which describes a family vacation of three generations — everyone still alive and still together — all staying in a tiny cottage on Cape Cod. I found it extremely anthropologically interesting. So this is how people might behave when everyone has stayed married, I thought.

This was not a wistful thought — it’s just curiosity. If I ever wished my parents had stayed together, I don’t remember it. It’s so hard for many parents to believe that their kids will be okay after they break up — it feels so deeply embedded into our society, this belief in the inevitability of the kids’ suffering. I wish this belief — or maybe it’s more of a superstition — would fade away, become one of the beliefs from the past. But that seems a long way away.

Just a couple days before my father died, when I was 22, I was sitting by his bedside watching him fade when he turned to me and apologized out of nowhere. “For what,” I asked. I sincerely could think of nothing for which he owed me an apology. “For the hard time you must have had, when your mother and I split,” he said. I was incredulous that he had been holding on to guilt about the breakup all that time. I told him that he had nothing to apologize for. I’m not sure he believed me, but I hope he was relieved.

Statistically speaking, about half the people reading this either have divorced or one day will. The stigma of divorce itself is fading, but I wonder how long it will be before more parents accept that divorce is not necessarily traumatic for kids. In fact, many parents find that divorce made them better parents. This isn’t just because, as the writer Lyz Lenz has written, it sometimes takes divorce to create equality in a partnership, forcing both parents to do an equal share of caregiving — although the significance of that circumstance cannot be overstated. It’s also because the process of separating can force parents to discuss how they actually care for their kids, bringing habits and assumptions to light that otherwise would go on being taken for granted, never examined, and never changed.

Obviously, the success of your post-divorce parenting depends on a lot of other people, too: a cooperative and present co-parent (or, if your co-parent is a nightmare, their absence might be essential to your family’s well-being), and solid, low-key new partners who know when to speak up and when to let you raise your own kids your way. But when the conditions line up, your post-divorce household can be a real place of peace. I’ve heard this repeated by many parents.

A mother of two whom I’ll call Jane told me that her parenting style has completely changed since her divorce, and she traces it to the directive often given by mediators and therapists to parents when they’re first splitting up to “let the kids lead.” Listen to kids’ questions and let them ask them in their own time.

“It meant that I started that next chapter, of parenting alone, in a very humbled position,” she recalls. “I spent a lot of time listening to the kids, and a lot of time just with them, and that became my new way. I started to build my life around them more than I had in the past.”

When she was married, Jane and her husband had taken a “divide and conquer” approach to parenting — familiar to many of us, I’m sure. The idea was mostly that the kids had to be managed, handled, controlled, so the parents could have an ounce of sanity left for their own relationship. Jane sees her relationship with her kids differently now. Rather than “handling” them, she spends time with them. “We definitely divided,” she laughs, referring to her divorce. “Not sure what needs to be conquered now, though.”

Another mother whom I’ll call Maria said, “I didn’t have to struggle to be heard or seen. I had time to care for my mental health, and I spend less time defending my parenting and more time being a good parent.”

A father I’ll call Jake said that making agreements with his ex-wife about bedtimes and screen time for their 8- and 12-year-olds meant that he was able to be more deliberate about parenting decisions that previously had mostly been dictated by necessity or, as he put it, “both of us deciding we didn’t want to talk about it or deal with it, so we just did what was easiest.”

Not everyone I spoke to said it was all upside, of course. One mother said that, while divorce made her more relaxed as a person and improved her relationship with her kids, she was overwhelmed with the responsibility of being the breadwinner and also doing so much housework; previously, her husband had been the home-parent. “Twelve years later, I’m still exhausted,” she said.

More than one parent told me that being witnessed parenting — parenting as a performance for your co-parent — had always inhibited them and that parenting in private felt more natural and easy. There’s no doubt that our culture takes parenting more seriously today than it ever has. Mostly, this is good for everyone: Up until just a few decades ago, raising children was considered a private matter, more or less entirely undertaken by women. Now that men are implicated, and parenting is a whole marketplace of ideas, what used to be private can now be debated publicly. One unintended consequence of this overall good development is that there’s so much more to argue about — approximately every little detail of child-rearing, if you’re truly matching each other’s freak. It’s enough to break up a marriage. Or, put another way, the contentious politics of parenting might be just what it takes to break up marriages that were headed for unhappiness anyway.