Why is the number of divorces on the rise? What tests are not ready for many newlyweds? And what role do children play in all of this? These questions are answered by a family psychologist.
“Is it normal when a family comes to a divorce?”. With this question, our colleagues from turned to family psychologist Anna Berdnikova. We share her reflections on the realities of modern marriage.
“The modern Russian family can be called less stable compared, for example, with the family of the past or the century before last. This is due primarily to the fact that the family has ceased to be a necessary condition for mass survival. Today, a person, regardless of gender, is quite capable of living alone, providing himself with the solution of those tasks that the family used to deal with, either independently or through outsourcing.
Creating, maintaining and developing family relationships is a daily physical and emotional work. This work is now quite avoidable, so the age of marriage is rising and the duration of marriage is falling. The infantilization of society is also growing: to live here and now, to listen to your desires, to be worthy of everything and at once — these are wonderful calls, but they show life from a childish position as the greatest good.
What trials await the family
In order for the family to survive and develop longer, someone in a couple, at least one, must take an adult position, be in contact with reality, and not just with their desires. In addition, the family is a structure in which not just two people meet with their cockroaches. In a young family, two family systems of newlyweds meet.
For the first few years, such a family becomes a battlefield for parental stereotypes.
Each of the partners has their own picture of a happy family life in their head, their own family rules, which, of course, must be implemented. In the candy-bouquet period of time, it never occurs to anyone to talk about what rules we will live by — hello to the conviction that «if love is real, then lovers understand each other without words.»
And there are a huge number of questions that would not hurt to discuss on the shore: how household duties are distributed, how the family budget is formed, how our leisure time will be organized, who will pay for it, what are family savings, how they will be formed and what will be spent on, how often our parents will visit us … These are just a small part of the things that, without being agreed, will again and again give rise to family conflicts.
From childish position to children
The birth of a child is a family test of strength. It usually leads to the maturation of a woman, if before that both partners were in a happy childish position. It is impossible not to take care of the child — the consequences will be fatal. Therefore, a woman grows up: she takes into account the needs of the child, predicts the development of various situations — financial, educational, professional, domestic.
If the family fails to agree and it is not possible to resolve the contradictions that arise in a timely manner, then it is destroyed.
Children stay with a woman because she is usually more willing to take responsibility for them. And by virtue of tradition, society puts more pressure on a woman. It is she who must be married, and it is with her that the children must remain, otherwise «what kind of woman is she?»
Social pressure on a woman can be illustrated with such a simple example. Meeting classmates after … twenty years after graduation. A woman can be an arbitrarily successful leader, scientist, politician, but if she does not have a husband or at least a child, she will receive not admiration, but sympathy. Well, if not gloating.
Divorce and child
In general, the destruction of the family is not the norm at the moment. Divorce of parents is always a disaster for a child. Father and mother perform various complementary tasks for the child, they share responsibility for family processes, teach their children by personal example to build relationships with people of their own and the opposite sex.
Therefore, a child needs both parents. For the parents of a child, going through a breakup can also be difficult, but not as much as for a child. Firstly, this is the choice of two adults, and secondly, the family that has just been destroyed is not the only one in their life, each of them also had at least a parental family, and each of them knows that life does not end with divorce . And the child does not know, therefore he is experiencing a catastrophe of a universal scale.
There are many forms of work and techniques to preserve the family.
I will give just one here. Each adult person has his own value in the market of grooms and brides, based on which he can choose a partner for himself. It is this thesis that, perhaps, not so utilitarianly formulated, is the basis for reasoning about who is a couple to whom and what misalliance is.
If you continue this reasoning in the spirit of «I managed to get a slightly better partner than I could, having my cost,» then you get to appreciate your partner and show him his value more often than if you think «he was lucky to get a star like me.»
Waking up in the morning with the words “how lucky I am to have such a wonderful person next to me who … (you can come up with a new continuation every day)” is extremely useful for maintaining and strengthening a marriage. And this technique works both ways.
Author: Anna Berdnikova, Head of the Department of Psychology and Pedagogy, MAOU OC Gornostai, consultant of the Insight clinic and the Sibmama website