By Mark Ryan, BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist
This is one of the questions couples ask most often and answer least candidly. It tends to arrive in the middle distance of a relationship that has stopped feeling like a partnership. It is not a crisis, and it is not quite a decision. It is the uncomfortable space in between, where both of you know something has changed and neither of you is ready to name what comes next. Children make the question feel both more urgent and more impossible, because the stakes are so clearly not just your own. If you have been carrying this question, what follows will not hand you a tidy verdict. It will offer a kinder and more honest way of thinking about it, because the question as it is usually posed tends to hide more than it shows.
Why the Question Is Asked the Wrong Way Round
The logic inside "should we stay together for the kids?" usually runs like this. Divorce damages children, staying together protects them, so we should stay. That would hold up if the thing that mattered most were whether the parents live under the same roof. It is not, and most parents sense this even when they cannot say why.
A review of how children adapt around parental divorce concluded that it is the family environment before and after the divorce, and not the legal event itself, that mainly accounts for how children fare. Conflict between the parents was a prominent part of that environment (Cao, Fine and Zhou, 2022). In plain terms, the risk for children follows the conflict and the atmosphere at home. It does not follow the address.
That does not mean separation costs nothing. A later study used methods designed to get closer to cause and effect. It found the evidence for an effect of divorce on children reasonably strong, but the effects were small, and children varied a great deal. Some declined, some improved and most did not change at all (Amato and Anthony, 2014). So separation carries real risk for some children, and it is not a disaster waiting to happen for all of them.
The better question is therefore this. What kind of home, with or without two parents under one roof, gives our children the best chance of growing up secure?
What Affects Children Most
In my experience children are rarely harmed by the bare fact of two households. They are shaped by the emotional weather around them. Frequent, visible conflict, contempt, cold silence and the strain of being caught between two people at war are what I hear about most often when adults look back on their childhoods. Children are also sensitive to a parent's sustained distress or emotional absence, whether that comes from the weight of an unhappy relationship they are staying in or from the difficulty of adjusting to life after separation.
Conflict does not have to be loud to be felt. I often meet couples who have kept their arguments quiet in the hope of protecting the children. A couple who stay together but remain locked in daily tension, whether it is shouted or swallowed, are not necessarily shielding anyone. Children are better barometers of a household than most adults give them credit for. They notice what they are not told, they absorb feelings nobody names, and they can carry the weight of an atmosphere they have no words for.
When Staying Together Makes Sense
None of this is an argument for separation as the default answer. There are real circumstances in which staying together, even in a relationship that is struggling, is the better choice for a family.
If the difficulties are specific and fixable, and both of you are willing to work on them, then staying together while that work happens is far more than holding on. It can be the foundation of something better. Many couples who arrive in therapy in real difficulty find that what felt like an irreconcilable gap was more workable than it looked from inside the conflict. Children benefit from watching their parents struggle, repair and keep a working partnership when things are hard. That is a very different picture from staying together in quiet resentment and calling it stability.
Staying also makes sense where the relationship still has real substance, and where the difficulty is a phase and not a direction of travel. Sometimes the question of separation arrives not from a clear sense that things are over but from the exhaustion of a hard period. Exhaustion, grief and disconnection can feel very like an ending when they are a stage of the relationship. Therapy often helps couples tell the difference.
If you are trying to work out whether what you feel is the end of the relationship or a chapter within it, that is the kind of question that benefits from space and some support in the room. I offer a free 30 minute introductory consultation for couples, in person or by video call.
The nature of the relationship challenges can dictate the impact on children
When Staying Together Stops Protecting Them
The harder conversation is about what staying together costs the children when the relationship has become corrosive. This is not about happiness as a luxury, or whether both parents feel fulfilled. It is about what children are living inside, and what it teaches them.
Sustained, unresolved conflict is not a neutral backdrop. It is an active stressor for the children who live with it, and it does not disappear because the parents remain married. The shape of the family is not the protective factor. The emotional environment is.
Children are also learning something that has nothing to do with open conflict. They are learning, passively and all the time, what a relationship is. They absorb how partners speak to each other, whether affection is visible, how a disagreement ends and what it looks like when two people stop trying. That becomes a blueprint. A study followed 821 young people for more than 25 years. The emotional involvement and closeness between their parents predicted the quality of the young people's own romantic relationships around 17 years later, through the parenting they received and their own emotional functioning (Ehrensaft, Knous Westfall and Cohen, 2011). In other words, what children see at the kitchen table travels with them into adult love.
This fits what I see in the therapy room. A household where love has been replaced by managed coexistence, where politeness covers contempt or where conflict is handled only well enough to function, teaches its own lessons about intimacy and about what people owe each other. Many adults tell me they spent years unlearning what they saw, and some say they did not realise it was a lesson at all.
This is easy to hear in the wrong direction, so I will be clear. Nobody is saying a difficult patch will damage your children for life, and nobody is saying that unhappy people should stay. A calm house is not the same thing as a good model of love. If you are unhappy, your children are learning from how you respond to that unhappiness, and that includes how you speak to each other, how you look after yourselves and how you handle a decision when it comes.
It can help to read How to Know When a Relationship Is Over alongside this piece. Whether to stay together for the children is a different question from whether the relationship itself still has something to offer. The two can pull in different directions, and it helps to look at them separately and not let one answer do the work of both.
Questions That Can Help You Think
Many couples find it easier to start with a few honest questions than with the big one. You might each sit with them separately first and then compare notes.
What do our children see when we are in the same room, and what do they hear when we think they cannot?
When we disagree, do we repair afterwards, or does the tension simply settle in until the next time?
If nothing changed for five years, what would our children have learned about love?
Is there something we have never properly tried, such as therapy, honest conversations or a change in how we share the load?
Are we staying out of hope, out of fear, or out of habit?
There are no right answers here, and the answers can differ between the two of you. That difference is useful information, and it is often the place where a good conversation can begin.
The Third Option Most Couples Don't Fully Consider
The framing of "stay together or separate" hides a third possibility that many couples find is the right answer for their family. It is a deliberate decision about the future, made together, with the children's needs at the centre, and not one that arrives through slow attrition.
This might mean committing to a defined period of couples therapy before any decision is made, with both of you fully engaged and not attending as a last formality before a decision already made in private. It might mean a trial separation structured carefully enough to answer real questions and not simply create new ones. It might mean working out, together and candidly, what the relationship could look like if it were redesigned around what you can each offer now, and not around the relationship you have outgrown.
That last option is more common than most people realise. Some couples discover that what they want, once they are honest, is not the relationship they have been trying to rescue but a different version of it, one that reflects where they are today. Can a Trial Separation Save a Relationship? looks at what a structured process involves and what it realistically offers.
If the answer turns out to be separation, how it is done matters enormously. In my experience children do best when their parents keep the temperature low, speak respectfully about each other, and make it clear that the children are not being asked to choose a side. A good separation is not painless, but it is a very different experience for a child from a bad one, and it is worth aiming for.
LGBTQ+ Families and Non Monogamous Configurations
The question of staying together for the children does not look identical across every family structure, so it helps to name some of the differences and not assume the usual framing fits.
For same sex couples with children, the decision about separation can carry extra weight. The family may exist because both parents worked hard to create it, through adoption, surrogacy, fostering or fertility treatment, sometimes against a backdrop of other people's doubts. That history can make separating feel as if it carries more than its own consequences, and it can make the question harder to look at clearly. There may also be a fear of confirming other people's prejudices. In my experience the principle holds as it does in any family. What matters most is the quality of the coparenting relationship and the emotional climate, and not whether the two parents live together.
For families in consensually non monogamous arrangements, the question may not fit the binary at all. The family is often already more than a single couple's household, and when one relationship within it is struggling, the relevant question may be how the wider network reorganises, and who stays in the children's lives. Children can be close to a parent's partner, and losing that person is a real loss that deserves attention. What I take from my work is that children need quality and consistency in their caregiving relationships and a calm emotional climate, and that the exact configuration of the adults around them matters far less.
What Couples Therapy Can Offer at This Point
Clarity before a decision, and not only after one. Therapy can help both of you tell the difference between exhaustion with the relationship as it is now and a loss of what the relationship was for. Those feel similar from the inside, but they point in different directions, and treating them as the same thing often leads to decisions that one or both of you regret.
A different kind of conversation about the children. Couples who try to decide this alone often find that any talk that gets close to the children quickly turns into who loves them more, whose choice is more selfish or who will be blamed. Therapy makes room for a conversation that starts from both of you asking what is best for your children, instead of defending your own position.
A way through if you decide to separate. If you both conclude that separation is right, therapy does not simply stop being useful. Helping two people separate in a way that keeps conflict low and keeps both parents available to their children is the kind of work couples therapy, and support with coparenting, is well suited to.
The Question Worth Asking Instead
The question "should we stay together for the kids?" leads people in circles because it frames a complex situation as a binary choice and looks for the answer in the structure of the family and not in its emotional substance. The more useful question is what our relationship, as it is right now, offers our children, and what would offer them more.
That question takes longer to answer and is harder to ask candidly. But it tends to point somewhere real, whether that is towards renewing a commitment with effort behind it, towards separating in a way that puts the children's needs at the centre, or towards something more creative and deliberate than either.
If you would like to explore what is right for your family in a space that is supportive and unbiased, then relationship therapy might be right for you. I offer free consultations (in person or online) where you can explore if therapy might be right for you. You can use the button below to book.
About the Author
Mark Ryan is a BACP Accredited Psychotherapist and NCPS Accredited Relationship Therapist, and the founder of Rise and Grow Therapy, a private practice offering couples and relationship therapy across Kensington, Pimlico, and Angel, Islington in London, as well as online consultations. His approach draws first on Imago Relationship Therapy, alongside integrative relational, attachment-based, Gottman, and systemic approaches. Mark works with couples of all kinds, including LGBTQ+ couples and those in non-traditional relationship structures such as consensual non-monogamy, as well as with individuals working through relational issues.
References
Amato, P. R., & Anthony, C. J. (2014). Estimating the effects of parental divorce and death with fixed effects models. Journal of Marriage and Family, 76(2), 370 to 386. https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12100
Cao, H., Fine, M. A., & Zhou, N. (2022). The Divorce Process and Child Adaptation Trajectory Typology (DPCATT) model: The shaping role of predivorce and postdivorce interparental conflict. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 25, 500 to 528. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-022-00379-3
Ehrensaft, M. K., Knous Westfall, H. M., & Cohen, P. (2011). Direct and indirect transmission of relationship functioning across generations. Journal of Family Psychology, 25(6), 942 to 952. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025606
