What I Have Learned About What Children Carry

When adults refuse to end things cleanly, someone else usually pays the bill.

Very often, it is the children.

They did not choose the marriage. They did not choose the conflict. They did not sign anything, vote on anything, or get a say in how long the adults would keep fighting over something that was already over.

But they carry it.

Marching into battle

I have watched it happen more times than I can count, and I have lived some of it myself.

A marriage begins to come apart. Instead of ending it plainly and with dignity, the adults dig in. They fight over property. They fight over who was right. And slowly, the people around them begin to choose sides. Grandparents. In-laws. Aunts and uncles. Friends. Distant relatives who barely knew the family suddenly line up as though they are marching into battle.

In all of that noise, almost nobody notices the children.

And the children, somehow, come to believe it is their fault. They become responsible, in their own minds, for the fact that Mom and Dad cannot get along.

The pastor's child

In church work, I saw an added layer of this.

When people were upset with the pastor, the pastor's children became an easy target. I remember hearing things like, "I can't believe the pastor's child pushed my child." It might have been an ordinary scuffle between two kids, the kind that happens on every playground in America. But because it was the pastor's child, it became something more.

People mistakenly put leaders on pedestals. Then they do the same thing to the leader's children.

But children are just children, the same way leaders are just human beings. Everyone is subject to the same struggles and weaknesses as everyone else. Children should not have to carry the weight of their parents' position, and they certainly should not have to carry other people's frustration with their parents.

The mental data center

Here is the image that has stayed with me.

Children hear everything. They hear the arguments in the next room. They hear the phone calls. They hear the tone at the dinner table. They hear what one parent says about the other, and what the grandparents say about both.

And they have no place to put it. No platform. No vote. No way to vent it.

So they become the mental data center of the family. All of the problems, the strife, and the grief from every side get uploaded into them.

But a child has nowhere to send that data. It does not go out. It goes in. It is internalized.

Pawns

In marriages that need to end respectfully and quietly, children too often become pawns.

Sometimes it is intentional. One parent uses the children to punish the other. Sometimes it is driven by ego. And sometimes it comes from real love and real disappointment, from simply not wanting something to be over.

But whatever the motive, of all the people hurt by endings that should have come quickly, children are among the most vulnerable.

I recently watched a friend walk through the hard end of a custody fight. Her ex-husband was arrested over unpaid child support. Her oldest child had wanted that accountability, and still she began to shake when she saw her father again and then saw him taken away. Even when a child believes the outcome is right, the child still carries the moment.

What the research says

I wondered whether anyone had ever studied how deep this goes. They have, and what they found surprised me in one important way.

The research does not say that the ending is what harms children most. It says the prolonged, unresolved conflict does.

Long-term studies of families after divorce have found that exposure to high levels of ongoing conflict between parents is a well-documented risk factor for later psychological problems in children, and in some families that conflict goes on for years (a longitudinal study published on PMC).

A review of 49 studies involving more than 23,000 people found a meaningful link between parental conflict and children feeling caught in the middle (Human Communication Research).

Canada's Department of Justice uses the same word I have used for years. Its review notes that parents who cannot contain their conflict tend to make their children pawns, and that children whose parents stay locked in hostility are more likely to struggle behaviorally, emotionally, and socially (Department of Justice Canada).

One study found that conflict between parents after divorce predicted children's fear of being abandoned, and that fear in turn predicted mental health problems months later (PMC). Other research on children ages 8 to 12 has looked at how they blame themselves for their parents' fighting and get pulled into it (PMC).

That is exactly what I have seen in church hallways, counseling offices, and living rooms for most of my life.

The ending is hard on children.

The war is harder.

What I have learned

If you are a parent in the middle of an ending, the most loving thing you can do for your children may be to stop fighting over what is already finished.

Say it plainly. Say it with dignity. We cannot walk together any longer.

Then keep the children out of the battle. Do not make them the messengers. Do not make them the referees. Do not make them the place where everyone unloads their grief.

They are not the data center. They are not the pawns. They are children.

A clean cut will still hurt them. But a clean cut can heal.

A war that never ends teaches them that love and conflict are the same thing, and they will carry that lesson into every relationship they ever have.

We owe them a better ending than that.

The DKP Word 2026
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