Telling Your Parents About Your Marriage Problems

In 2004 researchers at Cardiff University in the UK published a book (Grandparenting in Divorced Families Bristol: Policy Press) in which they claimed that couples delay telling their own parents that they had separated. It is an unusual finding because when families split up, women often want their parents to provide financial and emotional support and help with childcare. Men who have separated from their wives may ask their parents for temporary accommodation, financial support and help with their children.

A separation usually creates a dramatic and distressing change in children’s lives but it can also bring new and sometimes onerous responsibilities to their grandparents. Despite this, research seems to show that the grandparenting generation are often kept in the dark and are surprised when they are told that their son or daughter has separated and plans to get divorced. What are we to make of this? If grandparents are going to be asked to make sacrifices, why are they kept in the dark? Why do men and women confide in friends before they get round to telling their own parents?

The deliberate concealment of problems seems to be evidence that grandparents are not thought to be sufficiently important to their adult children to be kept informed. In the Cardiff study one grandmother explained:

I was upset because she hadn’t come to me because we’ve always had that mother/daughter relationship. I said to her, ‘Why didn’t you come and tell me?  Why didn’t you come and talk to me?’  I would have been ready to listen to her.  She said ‘I didn’t like to.  I was afraid of what you’d say.’  And I said ‘Well, I’m not that much of an ogre.  I’d have thought you’d have known me by now.’  I think she wanted to tell me but she was so upset.  But I said I was here for her and gave her cuddles, and talked to her and I said to her ‘You’ve just got to get on with your life now.’  But I think she was more worried about her dad than  me.

Men are just as reluctant to tell their parents if not more so:

“I phoned them (her parents-in-law) and said ‘I don’t know if you know but John (her ex husband) has actually left me.’  And they didn’t know! He hadn’t told them! So I told them the facts and they were horrified.”

Parents are usually more than willing to help their adult children and provide support for their grandchildren. Cherlin and Furstenberg (1986) describe grandparents as the ‘family watchdogs’ and explain that grandparents come into its own at times of crisis. Separating couples are pleasantly surprised by their parents’ reactions, receive lots of help and are sorry that they didn’t confide in them earlier. Why is this?

 Parents, it seems, continue to exert a powerful emotional hold on adult children. They may be 40-years old or more but they still concerned about what their own parents might say. They shield them from unpleasantness, worry about rejection and exhibit a child-like dependency when they are in need of help. Perhaps we never completely forget how important it was in childhood to please our parents and we continue to use this as a measure of the success of our adult lives. It seems that the child within us emerges when we are stressed and angry and feeling vulnerable. The simple truth is that divorced couples delay telling their parents about the failure of their marriages not because they have distanced ourselves from them or because they believe they are no longer relevant. It’s simply because they are worried that they might upset and disappoint them.