Are Kids Destroying Your Marriage?

Some modern critics of religion are now criticizing parenting because they think it is a religion. As such, it is “destroying marriages.” To quote Quartz:

Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America. As with many religions, complete unthinking devotion is required from its practitioners. Nothing in life is allowed to be more important than our children, and we must never speak a disloyal word about our relationships with our offspring. Children always come first. We accept this premise so reflexively today that we forget that it was not always so.

Hmmm. Here is a pretty solid refutation of this claim in Jezebel:

I think it’s misleading to suggest that kids destroy marriages when what they really do is reveal the fault lines. I would like to have happy, wonderful, passionate, engaged, mature couples with a proven ability to work through problems please tell me about how having a kid torpedoed their love like a paid marriage assassin. I’m going to guess with as much scientific backing as everyone else’s opinion on marriage that those couples are in the minority.

I personally agree that the stress and strain of having children does expose existing weaknesses in a relationship.

I can tell you that simply speaking about the purchase of life insurance exposes such weaknesses. Talking about the death of a spouse, and the prospect of being alone, is very intimidating.

If a couple has not upgraded their skills to deal with the tough issues, then the issues will overwhelm them. And the fact of the matter is that having children raises many tough issues. Couples need to ratchet up their game to handle them.

Make sense to you?