Why not both? All people, kids and adults, have a finite level of emotional and mental energy that they have to “dispense” in everyday life. If you are a coupl

Why not both? All people, kids and adults, have a finite level of emotional and mental energy that they have to “dispense” in everyday life. If you are a couple that’s dealing with marital strife, this is emotional overhead that gets diverted to dealing with that instead of your kids. Same goes for kids. A child that’s struggling to comprehend why parents decided to leave each other will be using that emotional energy to process it instead of focusing on personal growth. This is not taking into account the divorce process is costly, with money diverted to lawyers, instead of being pooled and applied to improve family life. Also, persons who divorce early in a relationship may not have taken the time to understand compatibility with each other, may be emotionally immature and impulsive. The lack of insight might be something that perpetuates into other aspects of their life. There are, obviously, relationship patterns where it takes a long time for one partner to realize the other one has gradually become more and more abusive and controlling, either because they have low self-confidence or self-esteem. This somewhat tracks the concept of emotional maturity, but this is difficult to talk about as this form of framing puts the blame onto the abused partner.