To Stay or Go - It Matters To Your Kids
It all begins with an idea.
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How To Prevent The New Year Divorce
It all begins with an idea.
December 29, 2016
Tipped off by Elvis Presley that not everyone is merry at Christmas, churches are increasingly tending to those who are hurting over the holidays. Their “Blue Christmas” services acknowledge that pain rarely takes a day off and, in fact, can intensify at precisely the season when the whole world seems happy.
But churches should also look to the needs of another suffering class: those who are about to be blue. They are the children who, blissfully unaware, are enjoying their last holiday season as part of an intact family.
It’s the dark underbelly of Christmas, the reality that, while most of us are preparing to celebrate during the last week of the year, hundreds of American couples are preparing for a New Year divorce.
Their grim holiday to-do list includes figuring out what (and when) to tell the kids, lining up an apartment (the second home they previously thought they couldn’t afford), setting up new bank accounts and closing joint credit cards. These are tasks performed with the secrecy of Santa, so as not to steal the children’s Christmas joy. Or so they say.
Couples who split – or begin to split – on the first Monday in January grit their teeth for one last family Christmas photo because they don’t want to ruin anyone’s holiday, be it their children’s or their parents’. This is among the many lies they tell themselves to justify the coming separation, because they’re not saving Christmas, but only procrastinating. They may not ruin this particular holiday, but certainly the next year’s, and possibly many more, as they thrust their children into a future in which their holidays are divided up like garments at the foot of the cross.
In divorce, living children assume the awkward status of frozen embryos: marital property that must be equally shared.
Parents who wait until after the holidays to split – so many that lawyers dub the first non-business day of the week in January “Divorce Monday” – say they’re doing so because they want to do what’s best for the kids, another untruth that David Schel, founder of Kids Against Divorce, repeatedly points out. When parents sincerely want to do what’s best for their children, they stay together, trusting that their problems (if not violence or serial adultery) will erode over time. As many long-marrieds can attest, they usually do. The Institute for Family Studies reported that 80 percent of unhappily married couples report being happy again within 5 years.
Schel is one of the few voices crying in the wilderness on the matter of divorce, particularly at this time of the year. For a few years, his group has been producing an online Advent calendar for marriages, which Schel calls 25 days of marital praise. The idea is to get married couples to spend a few weeks before Christmas appreciating the precious gift they already have, lest they throw it away in the new year like so much crumpled wrapping paper.
Unfortunately, it’s the sort of exercise that will likely be done by those who don’t really need it. But credit Schel and Kids Against Divorce for trying.
With the divorce season about to commence, many marriages are existing on life-support, and the time is ripe for intervention. Pastors could play a critical role. Even when they are busy readying their holiday sermons (and people expect to hear the Christmas story, of course). But with churches bulging with people who sit in a pew only twice a year, pastors have a holy obligation to prepare messages of consequence and import.
How many about-to-be-blue families might still be together next Christmas if they heard a message that spoke to the holiness of their own family? One that spoke of the importance of their own messy journey, slouching toward Bethlehem like Yeats’s rough beast? One that spoke not only of birth, but resurrection?
Meanwhile, the value of a long-term union is glimmering in Boston and its suburbs, where people are slipping diamond rings and wedding bands into Salvation Army kettles. When it first happened a few years ago, the donation made the local news, and now there’s a full-on trend of “kettle rings.”
At first blush, it seems as though the rings are being discarded, perhaps out of disdain for a failed marriage. But what’s happening is far more significant: People are leaving notes saying the gift is in honor of their late spouse, or the long marriage of relatives who have passed. The rings of divorce, presumably, are at the pawn shop. ‘Tis the season. But it doesn’t have to be, if more people would pay attention to marriages in trouble, particularly at this time of year, and reach out to help.
Divorce Court - The Best Way To Stop Divorce
It all begins with an idea.
June 16, 2014
By Jennifer Graham
DIVORCE IS not yet a sacrament, but in the past half-century it’s become the next-best thing: a blessed event to be celebrated at parties replete with champagne toasts and “freedom cakes.”
This is why, in The Washington Post recently, writer Scott Keyes could call conservative efforts to stem divorce a “fringe idea” without provoking a peep of outrage. In a culture in which half of all marriages end, divorce is a sacred cow with poison teats; critics tiptoe around it, mindful of insulting a friend, coworker, or relative. If they themselves are divorced, they’re pronounced bitter. If not, they’re misogynistic antiques hawking the values of a freedom-wary ayatollah.
Yet even the most vehement argument put forth by liberty lovers is enfeebled when a liberty does harm to innocent others, as divorce clearly does. Rare is the child whose reaction to his parents’ divorce is “Woo-hoo, let’s party!”
How then should conservatives joust at a grinning beast that makes families poorer and children susceptible to assorted other stresses, disorders, and delinquency, and to their own divorces? Current efforts focus on waiting periods, forcing a cooling-down period for combusting couples, and these may help. But there’s another option that’s free and accessible to all: divorce court. Real ones, not the TV show.
Queen Victoria famously said that no girl would go to the altar if she knew all. The same could be said of divorce court. On any given weekday across the Commonwealth, family court judges endure a gloomy parade of grievances. Once, waiting for my own sorry proceeding, I watched a couple, accompanied by a pair of pricey attorneys, argue for 10 minutes over jewelry. Not who would get it, but who would appraise it.
In deciding to part, the pair forsook the better and embraced the worst, not realizing that, for many, divorce doesn’t end problems, but creates new ones. If people were privy to real divorce hearings — the downward, embarrassed faces at dissolution, the furious chill of repeated child-support hearings — they might rethink the severity of their own troubles. The slogan of The Huffington Post’s divorce section says it all: “Marriages come and go, but divorce is forever.”
Can we make people spend a day in divorce court before allowing them to file for divorce? Why not? We force divorcing Massachusetts couples to endure a parenting class, which consists of five hours of kumbaya with dubious benefit. And the parents must pay. Conversely, family court sessions, generally open to the public, are free. Misery for the masses, on tap like a bitter beer.
Recently, I witnessed two people (and, of course, their attorneys) come before a judge in Cambridge because the mother had allowed their teenager to fly to Florida with another family, despite the father’s objection. So much for the parenting class. Or, for that matter, the “freedom cake.” Freedom’s just another word for “why don’t we let a complete stranger decide where we live and how much of our money we can keep?” Conservatives should refrain from divorcing just on the basis of governmental intrusion alone.
Of course, just as no one enters a marriage anticipating its end, no one thinks getting divorced is going to be that bad. “Everybody thinks they’re going to be different,” Michele Weiner-Davis told me. Weiner-Davis is an outlier, a brash Cassandra who makes a living trying to stop people from getting divorced. Her “Divorce Busting” book, website, and practice were born of the anguish she experienced when her parents divorced when she was a senior in high school and “this warm little nest fell apart.”
“It had such a profound effect on me, that I decided I wanted to be the Johnny Appleseed of love and teach people what they need to know so they’re not faced with that, to try to give a crystal ball into the future,” she said.
No one — not Weiner-Davis nor her compatriots at Kids Against Divorce or the Coalition for Divorce Reform (for which I occasionally write) — is encouraging people to stay in marriages that are abusive or wracked with addictions. But the troubling trend to celebrate, not mourn, the end of a marriage noisily obfuscates a truth: When ending, even a low-conflict marriage can molder into a high-conflict divorce. Open an observation window in the process, and there’d be far fewer cakes.
Jennifer Graham writes regularly for the Globe. Follow her on Twitter @grahamtoday.
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Can you learn to wed? Law proposed for pre-marriage classes
It all begins with an idea.
By Eun Kyung Kim
Colorado couples could be required to take premarital education classes before tying the knot, if a proposed ballot initiative goes through.
The Colorado Marriage Education Act would mandate 10 hours of pre-wedding instruction for first-time brides and grooms. Class time doubles to 20 hours for anyone getting married a second time — and triples to 30 hours for individuals wanting to head down the aisle a third time.
Widows and widowers would be held to the same 10-hour standard as a first-timer under the law, which would not apply to civil unions.
The effort is spearheaded by the California-based Kids Against Divorce, which says the premarital classes would help prepare couples for success in their marriages and, potentially, in parenthood.
“Kids Against Divorce has taken a stand on behalf of all children. By making the necessary changes on the front end of marriage, we can prevent the lifelong effects of divorce on the back end," organization founder David Schel told TODAY.com by email. “If we can prevent even one child from experiencing the tragic event of his/her family being split apart, then this was well worth it.”
The group needs 86,105 valid signatures by the Aug. 4 deadline to put the initiative on the state's November ballot.
Should the initiative pass, the Colorado State Board of Marriage and Family Therapist Examiners would develop the curriculum for the premarital classes and oversee its administration, Schel said. He added that the organization would like to see money management, health issues, conflict resolution and domestic resolution be among the topics addressed in the class.
TODAY’s Willie Geist noted that similar classes are required for anyone who wants to get married in the Catholic church. He said he took such a “Pre-Cana” class before he and his Catholic wife got married, but doesn’t credit the course for the strength of his marriage.
Tamron Hall, however, thought that an education class would be useful, especially for people like herself, who fear the idea of marriage.
"I don’t want to fail at this thing. I want to get it right whenever I do it," she said. "That’s something that really I hold sacred and I think everyone does when you take those vows. But if you take a class, I think that helps. It maybe will give you some confidence.”
But Al Roker noted that classes don’t always help with self-improvement efforts.
“It's worked so well with motor vehicles,” he told Hall sarcastically.
“That’s true,” she acknowledged. “I am a terrible driver.”
Colorado was the first state being targeted by Kids Against Divorce because its ballot process provided the group the most time to meet initiative requirements. However, the organization plans to propose similar bills in dozens of states across the country.
Source:http://www.today.com/news/can-you-learn-wed-law-proposed-pre-marri