The most important thing for a child’s wellbeing is the quality of the parents’ relationship. Regardless of their intentions, sometimes their hard effort fails to make their marriage a better and safe place for everyone. Instead, their relationship is toxic and damaging especially for the most innocent ones, the kids.
The children can become victims of deep trauma with long-lasting consequences on their psychological health. Growing with parents who have a bad marriage can make them emotionally inaccessible individuals.
It is no wonder that divorce is becoming more and more common. It is easier for the parents to separate than to try to fix things together. However, being aware of the damaging effects that divorce has on children, they decide to stay together. This way, children are forced to grow in disharmony and constant emotional tensions between their parents, suffering quietly in the hope of a better future.
Constant tension
Children are pure, so they absorb and adopt almost every kind of behavior they see in their parents. To incorporate and adopt the behavior of those around them plays an important part in child development. It is proven that the relationship of our parents impacts us emotionally and sets the base for the way we experience everything around us.
That is why their dysfunctional behavior makes us depressed and anxious, causing chronic fatigue. Growing in an environment with continuous tension produces not only emotional but social and mental problems as well.
A disrupted version of yourself
The war between the parents influences greatly the child’s self-confidence. Usually, these children have low self-esteem and very little energy to face everyday life challenges. They can’t find the peace they desperately need in order to function normally. So they might feel there is something wrong with them.
They also have a wrong image of how a family should look like, leaving permanent consequences on the way they understand the term family.
Fear of intimacy
Unhealed trauma eventually prevails and causes to develop a fear of intimacy in emotionally injured individuals. Every time they are intimate with someone, painful traumas arise making them feel overall tension they can not control. That is why they try their best to avoid any emotional relationship just to protect themselves not to be hurt.
Mood problems
A disastrous marriage causes serious mood problems in children. Dysthymia is a persistent mild depression that is one of the most common mood problems among these individuals. If untreated, it can lead to all kinds of personality disorders and substance abuse problems as well.
A hard time accepting failure
Children whose parents’ marriage is a failure, tend to feel that failure follows them all the time. These children were probably asked to achieve big things and were rebuked when they did not reach them.
Being overcritical to yourself
Feelings of being weak and not capable to succeed are the result of the catastrophic marriage in which the child was raised.
Fear of confronting others
Being witnesses of their parents’ continual quarrels makes these children afraid of confrontation. They avoid confronting others at all costs. They are afraid to engage in verbal communication anywhere they go, at their work or somewhere else. They don’t want to express their views, and they are submissive to others.
