If there’s one thing that will be at the back of your mind when you’re about to leave a toxic relationship or any kind of relationship, it’s what will happen to your kids if you decide to leave. You will even read articles, research papers postulating that kids who’ve been raised in a traditional family unit perform better than those who were raised in single-parent households, or kids from divorced families have abandonment issues and more. It’s one of the common reasons why most people stay in an unhappy marriage and relationship.

What you will realize is that the articles you’re reading or the papers you’re choosing are biased towards the benefits of staying in the marriage, even when you’re unhappy. You will really see the legitimacy of sticking to the relationship and persevering because you want your kids to have a better future. So, you really are scared for your kids if you leave.

But is there really such a thing as “I’m scared for my kids, I’m scared of what will happen to my kids if I leave”? You may really think that this is a big reason, but that’s mostly not the case. This is because even if you stay in the relationship, logically speaking, if you expose your kids to an abusive environment, what will happen? Let’s explore it further.

Staying Doesn’t Equate Good Behavior for Your Kids

The first thing we need to consider is that if you stay in an unhappy relationship, your kids who are like sponges will start picking up those behaviors. So even if you choose to stay in the relationship for the sake of your kids, it doesn’t mean that the kids will develop to be good people in the future. They may develop as people who normalize the abuse, or they might also become abusers themselves because they are seeing it happening, and they come to the point where they see it as just normal behavior.

https://toxicrelationships.medium.com/should-you-stay-together-for-the-sake-of-the-kids-8eeb920d3c9b

Familiarity

So, it’s not really being scared for your kids; it’s just that the environment you’re about to leave is a familiar environment to you, and when something is familiar to the mind, it will come up with any kind of reason, any kind of excuse to stay in the environment. You choose to stay not because you don’t have a choice but because your mind which has found comfort in hurtful and toxic environments is giving you all kinds of legit reasons on why you need to stay.

Challenging the Narrative

One thing you can do when you’re stuck in a situation in life is to look at studies which contradict your current worldview. For example, look for studies that indicate kids who were raised in a single-parent household and ended up being ‘fully’ functional and even better adults. As for me, I know of people close to me raised in an abusive, ‘healthy’, or even dysfunctional family, but they still ended up being better adults. The fact is we are all conditioned and we learn from our environment, and it doesn’t have to be from the nuclear family; it can be from the community as a whole or social groups. But we may never know how kids will turn out to be.

Staying in a Toxic Relationship = Getting Hurt

But what we are sure of is, if you stay in an unhealthy environment, you will get hurt, your self-esteem will be ruined, and your kids may also, and highly likely, grow up and forget about you. In simple terms, you may never know what will happen to them in the future, but what you know is you’re suffering on the inside, you’re ‘literally’ throwing away your life.

Statistics Has Two Sides

You may read all the statistics on how kids will turn out, but they are just statistics, and you may never know which side of the spectrum your kids will fall into once they grow up. It doesn’t matter if you’re raised in a single-parent household or a household with two parents. Sometimes kids may pick up good behaviors, sometimes kids may just pick up bad behaviors. But it’s not up to you. It’s not up to you to dictate the behaviors your kids will pick up. So, because you may never know, this realization may quell your fear for them, allowing you to focus on yourself. What you will realize is that the more you work on yourself, the more your kids or even those close to you will feel the warmth or the love you’re emanating from the core of your being.

https://toxicrelationships.medium.com/should-you-stay-together-for-the-sake-of-the-kids-8eeb920d3c9b

You just have to take care of yourself first. You just have to be responsible for you. Because the moment you become responsible for you, have boundaries, take care of yourself, at least your kids will get to see. But if you normalize the abuse or if you just stay for the sake of the kids, your kids also will grow up and then end up staying or end up becoming abusive because they are seeing it from you. They are seeing the deceit, how you are deceiving yourself or how you are acting as if everything is okay in the relationship.

Challenge the Mindset

If you’re stuck with this mindset of “I’m scared for my kids,” you can study about some people who have left with even three kids, some people have left the relationship when they were even expectant. Not to belittle your concern, but just to show you that there are possibilities even when you think that there are no possibilities. But it’s just that your mind wants to keep you there, your mind wants to steer you away from the unknown.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is normal to feel scared for your kids when you’re about to exit your unhealthy relationship, but it’s never really about that. It is mostly about your current perception of reality which wants to keep you in that familiar spot, and it will find the best logical reason to do so. And that reason mostly is always, “I will stay for the sake of the kids,” but that’s not the actual reason.

So, challenge that and look at people who’ve raised babies or kids in single households, and they’re just doing okay. So that you can really know that actually there’s nothing like that. It’s just the mind finding you with something which is convenient so that it can keep you in that familiar spot. So don’t really use your kids as something that prevents you from taking action in your life. Yes, it’s painful, but always take care of yourself because the moment you take care of yourself, there are other people who will benefit. And the main people who will benefit are also your kids. Like if you take care of yourself, your kids will benefit. If you don’t take care of yourself, your kids will also benefit from you not taking care of yourself, but on the negative side.

Note from the Author

If you’re ready and you’d like my help with healing, finding peace in life and breaking free from these toxic patterns, then you can book a FREE BREAKTHROUGH CALL with me HERE. Happy healing 💙💙. Feel free to share and comment! Use this information with caution, it comes from my own thoughts & bias, experiences and research😊.

References

1. https://www.dadsdivorcelaw.com/blog/i-want-to-get-divorced-but-i-am-afraid-of-hurting-my-kids#:~:text=Fears%20that%20the%20child%20may,heightened%20risk%20of%20these%20behaviors.