Only child marriage

The security from feeling firmly placed in the middle of a loving parental marriage can turn to anxiety when parents do not get along. Now the only child, intimately acquainted with the relationship between her mother and father, and highly emotionally attuned to both, feels caught in the middle of their tensions and conflicts with each other. 

An only child cannot be pulled into alliance with one parent in the marriage without at the same time becoming estranged from the other parent. 

None of these suggestions means that parents of an only child must always get along. That is an unrealistic expectation. Every marriage has its normal ups and downs. At issue is how to manage these inevitable tensions, upsets, and conflicts so that the only child doesn t feel in jeopardy, doesn t feel caught in the middle, doesn t feel at fault, doesn t feel responsible for making things better. 

In the United States today, an only child, no matter how beloved, is not exempt from a harsh statistic about one half of all marriages with children end in divorce. Because he or she is so tightly bonded to parents and is usually such an integral part of their marriage, parental divorce is particularly painful for an only child. Not only is the world of family broken apart, the only child feels additionally torn by opposing loyalties to parents who are in conflict with each other. 

How will the marriage of our only child alter his or her relationship to us ... 

The only child s marriage brings this observation home, and parents need to respect the primacy of this new commitment. Marriage does not mean that they are loved any less, only that their child has now found someone, a partner, to love more. 

Eventually she became a protege of Richard Abegg (1869-1910), Haber s former classmate and a newly appointed professor of chemistry in Breslau, and she earned her magna cum laude doctorate as the first woman at the University of Breslau in December 1900. Marriage followed jnst half a year later. Their only child, Hermann, was born in 1902, and she was transformed from an eager young scientist to a dissatisfied honsewife who now shared little of her husband s preoccupation with his research. ... 

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