Family Challenges

The Challenges that We All Share

There are stressors which may lead to marital breakdown that can be found in every relationship. The goal of Pilots for Families is not only to prevent total marital breakdown but also to help the many couples who live in stable but stressed relationships. Many of these couples can endure years of stress and dysfunction which can be either averted or more effectively managed.

Research has shown that of those marriages that do not end in divorce, less than 50 percent are truly happy marriages. This high distress level among couples can lead to personal distress, dislocation of lives, vulnerability to physical and mental disorders and growing strain on social institutions.

Standard approaches to treating marital distress provide interventions after problems have developed, when negative effects on spouses and children may already be in evidence. This website follows the course of providing an alternative approach. The goal is to teach competencies associated with successful adjustment before problems develop. However, before this can be accomplished the challenges must be understood and examined.

A View of the Challenges

The most cited statistic for divorce in the United States is 50%. This statistic is derived by dividing the number of marriages in a year by the number of divorces. This statistic includes all marriages, second, third or more. However, it is possible to examine this statistic at a more detailed level. With greater analysis, it can be seen that the more accurate statistic is 25% of the population has been divorced. This number is the number that is found when 1,000 people are randomly asked if they have been divorced in the United States.

Within the world of professional pilots, the divorce rate is astonishingly higher. Most airlines now have seven out of ten pilots who have been previously married.

A History of Family Challenges in the United States

In the early history of our own country, while it was still a group of colonies located on the frontier of a New World, divorce is rarely mentioned among historical writings. There were frequent devastating challenges faced by families. Early death and the resulting need for re-marriage was common. However, the mention of divorce was rare.

The industrial revolution beginning in the mid to late 1700’s led to a vast and dramatic shift in the way that life and family was done in much of American society. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, America was primarily an agrarian culture. The model of the family farm where family roles were largely similar to how they had been for thousands of years was replaced by a new model where work and family life became geographically separate entities.

Perhaps the best marker in American history to begin an in-depth examination of the implication of this seismic shift in American society on family life is the Great Depression of the 1930’s. During this devastating time in American history, when one in four families lacked a full-time income stream, stress on families became exceedingly high.

The familial stressors of the Great Depression were supplanted by the stressors of the Second World War in the 1940’s. During this enormous conflict many husbands and sons were lost. In addition to the terrible emotional pain accompanying these deaths, there was also the difficult reality that this also meant the loss of mentors, providers and protectors.

The wounds of the 1930’s and 1940’s left emotional scars on many members of the Builder Generation which they carried into their family lives. It appears that although there was a strong desire among the Builder Generation to have strong family lives as a result of their own challenges in childhood, they lacked the skill sets to achieve their stated goals. The Baby Boomer generation, in their youth, interpreted this as hypocrisy, when in fact, it was more a result of lack of healthy modeling and training.

All of this led to the legalization of no-fault divorce, first passed as law in California in 1968. Within two years of the passing of this law, the rate of divorce within California increased six-fold. This paved the way for similar legislation within other states and rates of divorce began to skyrocket across the United States.

Causes of Family Stress

The list of challenges that a couple can face in their marriage is daunting and, for some, scary.

These challenges can be classified as static or dynamic. Static stress factors in a marriage are personality traits and situations that are hard or impossible to change once married. Dynamic stress factors can be mitigated through training in order to reduce stress levels in a marriage context. The focus of many marriage enrichment programs is in reducing the dynamic stress factors in the marriage relationship.

STATIC FACTORS that are hard to change once married:

Having a personality tendency to react strongly to problems and disappointments
Having divorced parents
Living together prior to marriage
Being previously divorced, yourself, or your spouse
Having children from a previous marriage
Having different religious backgrounds
Marrying at a very young age (for example, at the age of 18 or 19; the average currently is about 25 or 26 years of age for first marriages)
Knowing each other only for a short time before marriage
Experiencing financial hardship
Having major mental health problems

DYNAMIC FACTORS couples can change to improve their odds:

Negative styles of talking and fighting with each other, such as arguments that rapidly become negative, put downs, and the silent treatment
Difficulty communicating well, especially when there are disagreements
Trouble handling disagreements as a team
Unrealistic beliefs about marriage
Lower levels of supportiveness between spouses
Having different attitudes about important matters
A low level of commitment to one another, reflected in such things as not protecting your relationship from others you are attracted to, or failing to view your marriage as a long term investment

Stages of How Families Breakdown

Research shows that two people initially become attracted to one another out of the mix of similarities, differences, and proximity. As time is spent together that is satisfying, a sense of attachment grows between the two people. Along with this bond comes a sense of anxiety over the potential loss of the loved one. Commitment develops in large measure to remove this anxiety by the promise of a future together. For many couples, this commitment culminates in marriage.

Prior to the wedding day, most first time married couples have had few tests of their ability to handle conflict. They simply have not encountered many significant issues or disagreements during courtship. That is partly why satisfaction tends to be very high at this stage. Yet, there’s clear evidence that how couples communicate and handle conflict foretells an important story about their future, and is more important than their premarital level of satisfaction. Over time, this committed couple must increasingly deal with the problems of life together. This explains why so many couples can start out so committed and so happy only to find their attachment being eroded by the constant dripping of unresolved and upsetting conflicts.

Negative interpretations about the spouse can become commonplace as a “me versus you” environment takes hold. These negative interpretations lead each to consistently interpret the actions of the other as more negative than is warranted. Confidence erodes and the sense of attachment that led to commitment in the first place becomes more fragile. In fact, it has been observed that many couples will begin regularly threatening the future of the relationship, as commitment becomes a pawn to be sacrificed in the heat of tormenting conflicts. Decisions to stay or leave now have more to do with the costs of leaving than the desire to stay.

A tragic cycle begins where negative interactions prevent a couple from being open to positive interactions. Eventually, a spouse may either consciously or sub-consciously cease to make it a priority to invest the time or energy required to foster positive interactions.

Often times, at this stage one or both spouses will have begun to have their relationship needs met in another person. Extra-marital affairs are often an outcome of this cycle, they do not precede it. “You almost always quickly discover that the process that led to an affair began a long time ago. When you can identify these signs, which eventually begin to crumble a relationship, you will recognize them when they come up and will be able to mitigate them.”

Understanding this cycle is important because it is not only the presence of high negatives that is related to marital failure but the absence of a strong positive bond as well. “It’s much easier to fight an enemy that you can see than one that is hidden among you.”