Maybe they should have divorced sooner?

Often times, when people speak disparaging of divorce, they will point out either expressly or impliedly that one reason it is “bad,” is because of the negative effect it has on children. And there are various studies that show that children of divorce may experience some negative behavior which is attributed to the fact that their parents were divorced.

The problem with that entire line of logic is that it confuses correlation with causation. Sure, some children of a failed marriage may do less well in school or divorce after their own marriage years later. But this is a correlation. Their parents were divorced and they too divorced.

But that correlation may be only one of dozens of other attributes they have and some of those may have a far greater effect, and others like marrying an alcoholic spouse may be the true “cause” of their eventual divorce.

The teen who used the “Affluenza” defense during his drunk driving case is back in the news after he and his mother fled to Mexico.

Some may claim this is an example of how divorce can affect a child, and that he is a case of another troubled child from a “broken” home. In reality, his parent’s divorce was the result of a deeply troubled relationship and those troubles began long before they divorced.

During that divorce, the mother was accused of substance abuse with pain pills and the father was alleged to be verbally abusive. The boy noted that his parents “yelled at each other a lot.”

The father said the marriage was a “mistake from the start.”

Is there anywhere but down to go from there? Perhaps if his parents had divorced earlier, before their relationship deteriorated to such a degree that their main form of communication was yelling, they may have been able to focus on providing him with a proper upbringing and not subjected him to Affluenza.

Source: abcnews.com,”‘ teen grew up in wealthy but unstable home,” Emily Schmall and Reese Dunklin, Associated Press, December 31, 2015