To the Editor:
Children don’t cause unhappy marriages; couples do.
The argument implied in Stephanie Coontz’s Feb. 5 Op-Ed article, “Till Children Do Us Part”—that children are the cause of a decline in the “marital quality” of a couple—is an insufficient response to a complicated issue.
Children are neither the solution to nor cause of problems between married couples. Both the so-called conventional view and the view expressed in Ms. Coontz’s article mistakenly shift the responsibility to create a happy marriage from the couple to the child.
A child will not heal a husband or wife’s own emotional wounds any more than would a trip to the Bahamas. What a child does offer a married couple, however, is the challenge of learning to love yet another person, even if it’s often at the cost of one’s own comfort.
It would have been valuable to see what criterion was used to define “marital quality” in the studies Ms. Coontz mentions in her article. If a person defines “marital quality” as never sacrificing personal ambition for the sake of a child, or as maintaining the same amount of alone-time a couple enjoyed before children, then, yes, the parent in question will most definitely experience dissatisfaction.
But in any human relationship, if what each person seeks is one’s self, he or she will always experience dissatisfaction.
Elizabeth Fisher
Washington, Feb. 5, 2009
Note from KBJ: Does the expression "for the sake of the children" even mean anything anymore? Sometimes I wonder.
