Kramer (vs Kramer) me.
October 14, 2017 6:53 PM Subscribe
Under what circumstances should be a person be excused/not harshly judged for leaving their young children?
This is not a homework assignment; this is how my mind works. I wonder about hypotheticals like this all the time. I am curious how people will answer. Thanks.
I am not a parent. I do know many people who are. Of these, I know people who were left by a partner/spouse. Some are bitter. Others are not. I have also known people who did the leaving. IME the people on both sides of this equation felt and feel pain and loss. Among these, none just bolted to without giving their kids a second thought, though I have no doubt such people exist.
Some say there is no excuse, ever, for anyone to leave their kids, no matter how young they were when they made them, no matter how much they don't get along with their partner, no matter their personal dreams. To use a fictional example, per this view, what Meryl Streep did in Kramer vs Kramer was wrong, period.
Others say that if the parents don't get along and one wants out and would make their children and spouse miserable if they stayed, they should just go and the former partners should find a way to work things out.
What I am really asking about is when one parent feels the other left them unjustly. Under what circumstances, if any, is this departing person justified in leaving and staying away when they are being pressured by their spouse and their spouse's family and by the courts to just go back to the marriage already? (Yes, this does happen.) When the consequences for noncompliance are never seeing the children again, especially because the departing person wants to maintain a relationship with those children, but is hampered in this both by their spouse's willingness to use seeing or not seeing the children as a weapon, and by a lack of money to afford good legal counsel? Is their staying away worth the damage caused to those children by an unamicable split?
I am not a parent. I do know many people who are. Of these, I know people who were left by a partner/spouse. Some are bitter. Others are not. I have also known people who did the leaving. IME the people on both sides of this equation felt and feel pain and loss. Among these, none just bolted to without giving their kids a second thought, though I have no doubt such people exist.
Some say there is no excuse, ever, for anyone to leave their kids, no matter how young they were when they made them, no matter how much they don't get along with their partner, no matter their personal dreams. To use a fictional example, per this view, what Meryl Streep did in Kramer vs Kramer was wrong, period.
Others say that if the parents don't get along and one wants out and would make their children and spouse miserable if they stayed, they should just go and the former partners should find a way to work things out.
What I am really asking about is when one parent feels the other left them unjustly. Under what circumstances, if any, is this departing person justified in leaving and staying away when they are being pressured by their spouse and their spouse's family and by the courts to just go back to the marriage already? (Yes, this does happen.) When the consequences for noncompliance are never seeing the children again, especially because the departing person wants to maintain a relationship with those children, but is hampered in this both by their spouse's willingness to use seeing or not seeing the children as a weapon, and by a lack of money to afford good legal counsel? Is their staying away worth the damage caused to those children by an unamicable split?
This post was deleted for the following reason: Heya, unless there's an actual personal context grounding this (in which case that would need to be clear in the framing of the question so folks can work with the actual details of a concrete predicament) this is pretty heavily into chatfilter territory on a pretty fraught topic. -- cortex
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