How Parents With Broken Marriage Can Teach Children About Healthy Marriages

When children are growing up, it is extremely important to maintain a healthy environment at home. Children's moral, mental and physical development highly depend on the kind of situation they come across at home. If the environment at home is filled with happiness and compassion among parents and children, the upbringing is healthy. However, if there is toxicity in the form of fights, arguments and silent treatments, children grow up with stunted mental and physical health. Can parents who are stuck in an unhappy marriage maintain the healthy upbringing of their children? Yes, they can - by not tainting their children's viewpoints about relationships. 

An Instagram user, Anjali Gorang, also received a similar query. She was asked by a woman how could she teach her child about healthy marriage when she and her husband are not compatible. 

Normalise that marriages can be unhappy

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A post shared by Anjali G Kothari | Family & Relationship Coach (@anjali.gorang)

Before offering a solution, Gorang recalls a dialogue from the movie Mrs Doubtfire. The dialogue is, "You know some parents when they are angry, get along much better when they don't live together. They don't fight all the time and they can become better people and much better mommies and daddies for you."

Adding further, Gorang says, "It is important to normalise the fact that two people cannot be compatible with each other and may bring out the worst of each other." Talking about how children can be taught about healthy marriage, she says, "But this doesn't mean they are bad people. They just don't get along together. It is also extremely important that you heal your wounds from your broken marriage so that the bitterness of the marriage doesn't percolate in your child's marriage."

Why do marriages in India become a compromise?

Any normal marriage in India is ruled by social expectations more than by love, emotions and compatibility. Often, marriages are set up based on familial, political and business relations. It is not shocking that the majority of marriages in India are arranged. Not that love marriages are better than arranged marriages, every marriage keeps struggling to gain social validity. Not even a year passes, couples are expected to have a child. Couples have to balance the expectations of both families with women sacrificing more than their male partners. Moreover, the patriarchal internalisations of either of the partners make the marriage toxic and incompatible. 

Research shows that 1.36 million Indians are divorced. However, the number of people who are separated is twice the number who are divorced making up to 0.61 per cent of marriages in India. 

Separated couples in India surpass the ones who are divorced

The wide difference between divorce and separation tells a tale of the patriarchal stigma around marriages. Divorce is not considered a moral option in India which is why the divorce rate in the country is the lowest in the entire world. However, separation is a bit more acceptable as it has chances to mend the marriage. Couples choose separation over divorce to escape social criticism. 

Child custody battle and how it affects children

However, there is one more reason why divorce is not considered healthy. The ugly fight over the custody of the children. Keeping aside the problems in the child custody laws, let's consider how the battle affects the children. While parents fight to get custody, children's emotional and overall development is directly impacted. Research shows that long custody battle leads to stress, anxiety and behavioural problems among children. Witnessing the regular fights further worsens their psychological development affecting their sense of security and safety. 

A personal anecdote

I too grew up with parents who shared an unhappy marriage. Witnessing domestic violence, silent treatments, infidelity and other consequences of the toxicity affected my mental health to the extent that I developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and other mental illnesses. Now, my parents live together and rarely fight but the incidents I witnessed as a child are ingrained in my mind. I have become apprehensive about the idea of marriage and have trust issues when it comes to men. 

However, after watching Gorang's reel, I realised that my conclusion about the definition of marriage is not right. When she talked about normalising incompatible couples, I understood that my parents' marriage was just not good. But their parenting skills and personality were right. They stuck together despite the fights just to maintain their children's healthy upbringing. 

Children must be taught about separation and divorce

When children are taught about marriage, they must not be fed with the idea that marriage binds two people for a lifetime. Children must be taught about the possibility of bad marriages, incompatibility and separation or divorce. Of course, the idea of a healthy marriage must mainly include love and emotions but a healthy marriage is also one which is not toxic and the one which doesn't pin down either of the partners from walking away. 

This way, children will learn about the real definition of relationships - a roller coaster of ups and downs. By knowing that some relationships don't work, they will not have unrealistic ideas of relationships - either bad or dreamy. Rather, they will accept the fact that relationships might not work but people can be good as individuals. Children will learn how toxicity impacts relationships and how it can be dealt with. 

Ending this article with a statement that Gorang made, "Just like roses have thorns and lotuses grow in stagnant water and rainbows are visible on cloudy skies, we can still choose to appreciate and admire the beauty." 

Views expressed are the author's own.