Is it better for the children if we stay together?

The question is the wrong one, and that is not a dodge. What harms or helps children is not the shape of the family but the tone between the adults and the reliability they experience. There are good reasons to stay together, and there are good reasons not to. Either way, what decides is how you do it.

What children really pick up on

More than most parents think, and something different from what they think.

Children rarely pick up the content. They pick up the state of things. The tension at dinner. Two people sitting in the same room and not talking to each other. The voice that is half an octave higher than usual.

What weighs on children can be narrowed down to three things:

Constant tension without resolution. A fight that gets resolved can even be valuable for children. It teaches them that people can argue and find their way back to each other. What weighs on them is fighting they witness and whose end they never see.

Being pulled into the middle. When a child carries messages, is expected to take sides, learns things that are not meant for them, or senses that one parent needs them against the other.

Contempt between the parents. Not loud arguing. The tone in which parents talk about each other, even in passing, even in a side remark. Children understand this tone early.

Why “we’re staying for the children” often doesn’t add up

Not because it is or isn’t honourable. But because the sum often doesn’t add up the way people expect.

When two people stay together and are both unhappy, the child grows up in exactly the state that harms them: constant tension without resolution. On top of that, they learn a model of relationships that they will later bring into their own.

But there is a version where it does add up: when two people decide to stay together and then genuinely work on how they treat each other. That is something other than just holding out. It is a decision with consequences for your own behaviour.

So the question for you is not whether you stay. It is: are you staying and changing something, or are you staying and enduring?

And if you separate?

Then nothing is lost. Children do well after a separation when four things are right.

They hear it from both parents, together, in simple words. Without blame, without details, with the reassurance that it has nothing to do with them and that both parents are staying in their lives.

They don’t become messengers. Arrangements are made between the adults, not through the child.

They are allowed to love both parents without having to pay for it. When you are hurt, this is the hardest point, and the most important one.

Everyday life stays reliable. Who picks up when, where things are, when they see whom. Reliability cushions a great deal.

If these four things work, a separation is a hard time for children and not lifelong damage. If they don’t, the problem is not the separation itself but how things are handled afterwards.

What you can do now, whatever you decide

Four things have an immediate effect, however you decide.

• Don’t fight in front of the children. And if it happens, let them see the making up too.
• Never speak disparagingly about the other parent, not even in passing, not even on the phone in the next room.
• Explain the mood to them in one sentence. “Daddy and I are often tired at the moment and argue more. It has nothing to do with you.” Otherwise children invent their own explanation, and it is usually that it is their fault.
• Make sure every child has an adult they can talk to who is not part of the conflict.

Where this weighing up ends

With violence there is nothing to weigh up. Children who witness violence between their parents are affected by it, even if they are never hit themselves and even if they are in the next room.

The same applies to systematic belittling and control. In these cases, leaving is not a loss for the children but protection.

The German helpline Hilfetelefon Gewalt gegen Frauen (violence against women) can be reached around the clock and free of charge on 116 016.

What I want you to take with you

Behind this question there is often another one. Women ask what is better for the children and mean: am I allowed to want what I want?

I cannot give you permission for that, and you don’t need it.

What I can tell you is this: the children don’t need you to sacrifice yourself. They need adults who treat each other in a way that lets a child breathe calmly in the same room. That is possible with two households, and with one. Both take work.