Appreciating The Pain Divorce Inflicts On Kids

[David]

AP

DIVORCE STUDY BREAKS NEW GROUND

By Maggie Gallagher
Tue Oct 11, 8:06 PM ET

If you've been in the marriage debate for 20 years, you seldom hear something really new.

But Elizabeth Marquardt (a former colleague of mine at the Institute for American Values) has just released a startlingly original study of children of divorce, "Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce" (Crown). Marquardt is a child of a good divorce herself, with parents who both continued to love, see and support her.

Marquardt has two insights: The first is that suffering matters. The divorce debate has been obsessed with social science pathologies -- if you get divorced, will your child be a high school dropout? A pregnant teen? Clinically depressed? And yes, the social science evidence shows that when parents don't stay married, children are at increased risk for these negative outcomes and a whole lot more. (My shop, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, just released "Do Married Parents Reduce Crime?" a review of recent research linking family structure and delinquency. For a copy, e-mail joshua@imapp.org.)

But most children of divorce aren't depressed dropouts who turn to a life of crime. Yet Marquardt wants to tell us that neither do most children emerge from divorce unscathed by the experience.

For a parent, the news from divorce-land offered in Marquardt's nationally representative data is heartbreaking: For example, adult children of divorce are three times more likely to disagree with the statement "I generally felt physically safe" as a child. Four out of 10 children of divorce say they "generally felt emotionally safe" as a child, compared to almost eight out of 10 children in intact families. Only one-third of children of divorce strongly agreed that "Children were at the center of my family" (compared with 63 percent of children whose parents stayed married). Children of divorce were six times more likely than children of intact families to strongly agree that "I was alone a lot as a child." When asked where they went when they needed comfort, only a minority of children of divorce said to one or both of their parents (33 percent), compared to almost 68 percent of children in intact families. Almost 70 percent of children whose parents stayed married strongly agreed that "My childhood was filled with playing," compared to just 43 percent of children of divorce.

Thirty-eight percent of children in divorced families (compared to 13 percent in intact families) agreed that "There are things my mother has done that I find hard to forgive." The majority of children of divorce (51 percent, compared to 17 percent of children in intact families) agreed that "There are things my father has done that I find hard to forgive."

Clearly, divorce does something to childhood and to children, even when it doesn't "permanently damage" them in the ways that social scientists know how to measure.

Marquardt's second insight into the damage divorce does runs something like this. Every child has a double-origin, a mother and a father, to whom he or she longs to attach. When parents marry, it is their job to reconcile these differences into a union, to give their child a single family in which to grow up. With divorce, the adults announce they have given up on the task. But the job doesn't go away, because a child's need to make sense of his or her own identity doesn't end with the marriage. Instead, the adult job of making sense of two increasingly different adult worlds gets handed to a small child, who must wrestle with big questions unacknowledged, unaided and alone.

A good divorce, she says, is better than a bad divorce, but it is no solution to the child's longing for an undivided self.