Before the legal and social sea changes that fundamentally altered the institution of marriage in the 1970s, unhappy spouses stayed married “for the sake of the children.” In the decades since, this view has often been derided and denied as unnecessary, even antiquated. However, as one out of two marriages end in divorce, up to one million children per year continue to experience the trauma of divorce. Only within the past ten years has it become brutally clear that the negative impact on divorce on these children has been disproportionate (compared to their parents) and dire.

One landmark study on the impact of divorce on adult children conducted by Judith Wallerstein caused major reverberations when it was released in 1999. In this study, Wallerstein and her colleagues resoundingly demonstrated that parental divorce causes heretofore unacknowledged emotional and behavioral negative consequences — including mood disorders, school failures, and relationship problems — in 25 percent of adult children of divorce who were tracked in many cases into their forties. This was compared to 10 percent of adult children from intact families who experienced these problems.

Wallerstein's study demolished a popular myth advocating the view that it is less harmful for children to experience the temporary trauma of divorce than to witness parents' ongoing marital unhappiness. In reality, the degree of damage to children depends upon the level of unhappiness or abuse they witness. A good case can also be made that when children witness divorce they are seeing a harmful example of their parents' failure to keep a lifelong commitment. Which is the worse behavior for a child to witness firsthand: marital conflict or the avoidance of commitment? Only you can decide, based on your own marriage and personal experience.

This all assumes underage children are involved in the marriage. When two adults without children come to such a volatile crossroads in a relationship, the bar is obviously much lower. Personal growth can be valid reason for a divorce when one of the parties believes he has worked extremely hard to bring improvement to a marital relationship and is frustrated by a lack of effort by his spouse or a lack of results. If children under eighteen are involved in your decision, the decision should be examined with much more care and concern for the children's welfare.

Creative Solutions for the Sake of the Children

If there are underage children involved, perhaps other arrangements can be made so the marriage can continue until the youngest child reaches eighteen. You may be able to remain husband and wife and parent your children while maintaining quasi-independent lives. One of you may have an additional residence. Remember there are no longer any or many hard-and-fast rules for marriage. The man and woman in each marital relationship independently create most of the rules that govern their lives together.

Within the realm of what's considered acceptable in modern-day America there are many flavors of marriage; there are commuter marriages where couples reunite monthly, marriages with stay-at-home dads, same-sex marriages, marriages where exes share holidays together with a new spouse and all their children, and many other creatively structured relationships where the central objective is to sacrifice or adjust adult needs to meet the primary needs of the children — whether these are social, emotional, financial, or all of the above. Seeking outside therapy can assist you in finding other ways to remain in the relationship for the purpose of keeping your family intact until the children are older.

The completion of the commitment you made when you married and especially after you created a child together contains an integrity that is often overlooked — or worse, scorned as “old fashioned” — in today's individualistic culture. Once again, underage children are the real victims of a divorce. It is their well-being that must be considered before the decision to divorce is made final, or before a family is dissolved.