“...
while chatting yesterday with Pragnil, I mentioned, in a critical and vaguely ironic tone, that - J. lives with his wife, his children, the children he had with another woman during his current relationship, and the children his wife had with another man during their current relationship... -, Pragnil promptly replied - Did you feel any negative vibrations in that family? -. I was stunned, silent in my thoughts... no, in fact, it may have been one of the families where I felt the best atmosphere.
...”
Children are generally both the main reason for and the most delicate part of a family.
Everyone would agree that the ideal environment in which to raise children is a quiet, respectful, peaceful one. Any alteration of this ideal environment, even if temporary, carries negative consequences for children, however small they may be.
Unfortunately, creating a quiet family environment is an arduous task dependent on certain factors that can scarcely be controlled. Irrefutable evidence of this is the statistics on the failure of the nuclear family: many, many parental couples are separated, and a multitude of adults present psychological problems of every magnitude due to traumas that occurred within the families in which they grew up.
One can only come to an obvious conclusion: the family, as it is formed in the majority of modern societies, does not work.
In a general and rough manner, in our societies, the family is formed by a couple of adults in a relationship who decide to follow the canons of society: they create a nuclear family in a home where they raise children.
The problem is that by definition, the relationship between the two adults in the couple is constantly changing. The individual, more often than not, changes with time.
Think of the person we were a decade ago. Two individuals, being separate beings, change in different ways, the consequence being that problems in the relationship begin to arise with the passage of time.
The couple must, therefore, make constant efforts to maintain the relationship, agreements, and compromises made previously. Even if these efforts are successful, there are consequences: the energies taken to maintain the couple's relationship are taken from attention paid to the children. Not to mention what happens when these efforts are not enough to maintain the couple's relationship: the best scenario is separation, which signals the start of a hellish ordeal for the children, beginning with the division of the family and following with the problems of separated parents, child management, and new parents' families. The worst case is when parents do not separate and create intolerable situations for their children’s delicate psyches, causing trauma that at best is patched years later with extensive psychological treatment.
The couple's relationship is, therefore, the ruination of the family environment[34].
Centuries ago, the family was not created by a couple's relationship, but by convenience or an agreement between the spouses' families... marriage for "love" is relatively recent thing. In some cultures today, arranged marriages statistically function better than "love" marriages: when there is no couple relationship, marriage functions better.
Of course, arranged marriage cannot be promoted: every human being must have the freedom to choose his or her own destiny.
So if one's first priority is the serenity of the environment in which your children are raised, you should probably review the concept of family.