CCF former Co-Chair Joshua Coleman posted this on 1/25/16 for The New York Times’ Room for Debate dialogue sparked by the Times’ burning interest “Hillary Clinton Deals with Her Husband’s Transgressions.”

It’s hard enough for couples to navigate the pain of an affair without everybody and their media outlets weighing in on it. To have your child exposed to jokes and lurid speculation about their parents’ marriage, sex lives and motivations is something that would severely test the strongest of couples. But when one or both parents fail that test and join in on the blaming and mudflinging, their children suffer immensely. While Hillary Clinton’s alleged attempts to discredit the women with whom her husband cheated may not be considered a good form of sisterhood, it could be a reasonable act of motherhood.

I’ve seen this dynamic played out in many of the wealthy Silicon Valley families that I work with in the Bay Area after an affair. As a psychologist and family therapist, I’ve witnessed far too many parents perfectly willing to ruin their children’s lives by exposing them to the most unseemly aspects of their mother’s or father’s actions, with the lame explanation that they’re doing it for the child’s benefit.

So while Hillary Clinton’s alleged attempts to discredit the women with whom her husband cheated may not be considered a good form of sisterhood, it certainly could be considered a reasonable act of motherhood.

I don’t assume that Clinton stayed with her husband after his affairs because of her ambition. These are two people who care intensely about shared goals and values, something that can allow couples to recover from infidelity. But I certainly wouldn’t blame her if she did stay for such practical reasons. I also wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t want to put herself or her daughter through a divorce, especially given the tabloid lens through which it would be viewed and commented on daily.

In the United States, we have elevated romantic love to such dizzying heights that staying together for practical reasons or because you think it’s better for your kids is somehow considered an act of existential cowardice. Only the starry­eyed pursuit of romantic love is considered a worthy enough compass on which to navigate one’s life. This is one reason we have higher rates of marital and cohabitation dissolution, and faster rates of recoupling, than most other countries ­­ creating heightened exposure to transitions and instability that are harmful to children.

Children and career often operate in a kind of fog of war where we have to choose our priorities based on our best guess of which commitment should be prioritized. “Life doesn’t always hand us the option of successfully maintaining an alliance between our marital goals, our aspirations for our children and our ideological commitments,” notes sociologist Barbara Risman, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.”

The Clintons have managed to keep their marriage intact, successfully raise a healthy daughter, despite the public humiliation, and Bill Clinton now seems to prioritize his wife’s aspirations in the same way that she had to prioritize his many years before. I’ve sure seen a lot more destructive reactions to infidelity in my practice.

I’ve sure seen a lot more destructive reactions to infidelity in my practice.

Joshua Coleman, the author of “When Parents Hurt: Compassionate Strategies When You and Your Grown Child Don’t Get Along”, is a senior fellow at the Council on Contemporary Families, as well as a private practice psychologist.