Every Marriage Takes Work. Whether you have special needs kids or not marriage takes effort and care.
Every relationship is challenging, and adding children to any family increases stress on a marriage. Co-parenting is not easy. We all have preconceived ideas of how to parent from the way we were raised and these ideas may not mesh with our spouse.
When a child has special needs, like ADHD, Autism, Cerebral Palsy, Williams syndrome, etcetera parenting issues can arise from how parents handle emotional strain and from who carries the primary burden. But, research now suggests divorce rates among families with special needs kids are based on family size. Families with more children have lower divorce rates.
No child with special needs is responsible for their parent’s divorce. You enter a marriage optimistically, doing your best for your partner, and the family. Often problems arise because of the amount of participation from each parent. This can vary based on how they are doing emotionally.
The correlation between the division of responsibility and divorce for parents of special needs kids.
Unfortunately, there is a correlation between how much responsibility each parent takes for the care of the special needs child and divorce. There is a high rate of men who can’t seem to handle the emotional strain of raising a special needs child, and they tend to focus on work creating distance between themselves and their emotions as well as between themselves and their families.
This is not the problem in every divorce case, and some fathers handle the care of their special needs children brilliantly, but help centers report a vast number of women calling and pleading for help for their special needs child and themselves due to the emotional distancing of their spouse or divorce.
There are no easy answers. It is positive that the report we often see cited stating 80% of parents to autistic children get divorced, has been since debunked.
The numbers were re-examined in a different study, and they found that parents of children with autism spectrum disorders had a 10% increase in the chance of getting divorced, but The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study suggests even lower percentages.
The Results of The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study of divorce rates for parents of Special needs kids.
What caught my attention was a research study published by the National Institute of Health. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. They stated “…we found that divorce rates were not elevated, on average, in families with a child with developmental disabilities.” This was the conclusion of a 50-year study were published in 2015.
The results found that there was about a two percent higher risk of divorce. When you figure in a statistical margin of error of three percent, the difference is negligible.
Previous studies did show there was an increased risk of divorce for parents of children with developmental disabilities, but when you take a closer look there are flaws in these studies.
Most research studies that found significantly higher divorce rates for these families only looked at specific periods of time during the marriage and family life. For instance, they studied school-aged kids or adult children. They didn’t consider the entire span of the marriage.
The Results of The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study for how family size affects the divorce rate for families of special needs kids.
Unfortunately, this wonderful new rate of divorce for parents of special needs kids doesn’t hold true for all families. ”In small families, there was a significantly higher risk of divorce relative to a normative comparison group.”
The study unearthed interesting results about family size and its correlation to the divorce rate. Among families without special needs, the more children they had, the more likely they were to divorce. The opposite is true of families with Special Needs children. If they had more children they were less likely to divorce.
The hypothesis is it could be due to the ability of large families to distribute care for the child with Special Needs among more people, making it easier to manage and providing extra support as parents grow older.
A few limitations of the study:
- There were not many minority populations represented within the study.
- The study was conducted with a group of people who tended to get married younger and have more children than today’s couples.
- Future studies are warranted to see if the findings can be replicated.
- It’s been found in other studies that marriage later in life generally makes for a more stable marriage, so it is unlikely the results would change solely because new studies included more people marring later in life.
Because of the span of years this study encompasses and the methods it employed, I feel this is a good picture of what it looks like within many families.
Parents of special needs kids may have a better chance of a deeply committed marriage if they make it through the stages of grief and work together to help their special needs child.
If you get anything from this study let it be hope. Just because you have a child with special needs doesn’t mean you’re doomed to divorce your spouse. Your marriage takes work and care, like any other marriage, but you have the same chance to make it work as anyone else.
In fact, if you make it through the stages of grief and join your efforts to support your special needs child you may have a deeper marriage that flourishes because of your adversities.
Check out my post on the stages of grief and learn what helped me through it!
So ignore the statistic and go spend time with your spouse and children!
Copyright Annie Eklöv
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