Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have completed a study which found that when a child is exposed to multiple transitions in his or her mother’s live-in partners, aggressive behaviors are the result. Primarily in white children, the study determined that when a child fourteen or younger had endured more than two changes in mom’s romantic relationships the troubling behaviors increased. The correlation was not found when mothers kept their dating partners outside the home, living separately. Yet if there were at least three different live-in relationships, which would include marriages or cohabitating lovers, it seemed to trigger significant behavioral difficulties for the kids. The report and its findings will be published in the next April issue of the American Sociological Review.
My first thought is . . . did we really need a study to tell us this?
My second thought is . . . are we sometimes diagnosing children with behavioral disorders such as ADHD to cover for our own irresponsibility?
And my third thought is about my stepdaughter Cassidy. She occasionally still acts out aggressively towards her siblings in our home, including teasing and provoking my autistic son. She also struggles with dishonesty, and tells either dramatic or meaningless lies many times a day. Her hyperactivity is very challenging. I have pondered several kinds of medical theories and currently have seen improvement with Adderall. Yet I wonder, how much of these behaviors are caused by the simple fact that by the age of nine, she had three different men to call “Dad” and two to call “Mom?” When I married her father, she had already survived her parents’ divorce and was dealing with a second one. Several years later, her mother remarried once again. In all this family upheaval, she has had to get used to four new step-brothers and two half-sisters. That’s a whole lot of mayhem for one little decade of a life.
Of course, my hope is that her father and I have been able to provide some stability amidst this chaos. We both found ourselves unexpectedly divorced and tried to pick up the pieces in a responsible manner. Yet some might argue that the best alternative for the kids would have been for us to remain single rather than expose them to new relationships. Personally, I’ve seen a whole lot of positive things come from setting up a two-parent home for these children. It would have been a lonely road to raise them without a partner. And without my second marriage, I wouldn’t have three beautiful daughters. Still, I feel regret that these kids have had to deal with so much emotional upheaval.
Obviously, one of the best things we can do as parents is to make sure our marriages are happy and enduring.
Kristyn Crow is the author of this blog. Visit her website by clicking here. Some links on this blog may have been generated by outside sources are not necessarily endorsed by Kristyn Crow.