effects of divorce on children; a subjective approach

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November 5, 2005

 

 

Poll Says Even Quiet Divorces Affect Children's Paths

 

By TAMAR LEWIN

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Even in a "good divorce," in which parents amicably minimize their

conflicts, children of divorce inhabit a more difficult emotional

landscape than those in intact families, according to a new survey of

1,500 people ages 18 t0 35.

 

"All the happy talk about divorce is designed to reassure parents,"

Elizabeth Marquardt, author of the study, described in her new book,

"Between Two Worlds.But it's not the truth for children. Even a good

divorce restructures children's childhoods and leaves them traveling

between two distinct worlds. It becomes their job, not their parents',

to make sense of those two worlds."

 

Ms. Marquardt, 35, is an affiliate scholar with the Institute for

American Values, a nonpartisan advocacy group that strongly emphasizes

marriage. She is, she says, the first child of divorce to publish a

broad study on how divorce affects children.

 

It is no small question. The nation's divorce rate reached record levels

in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and Norval D. Glenn, a professor of

sociology at the University of Texas, said that about a quarter of all

Americans age 18 to 35 were not yet 16 when they experienced their

parents' divorce.

 

There are no reliable national statistics on divorce, but most experts

say that even with divorce rates edging down, about three-quarters of a

million American children see their parents divorce each year. The new

survey, based on the first nationally representative sample of young

adults, highlights the many ways that divorce shapes the emotional tenor

of childhood.

 

For example, those who grew up in divorced families were far more likely

than those with married parents to say that they felt like a different

person with each parent, that they sometimes felt like outsiders in

their own home and that they had been alone a lot as a child.

 

Those with married parents, however, were far more likely to say that

children were at the center of their family and that they generally felt

emotionally safe.

 

In the study, all those from divorced families had experienced their

parents' divorce before age 14 and had maintained contact with both

parents. Most of the time, Ms. Marquardt maintains, children with

married parents need not concern themselves with their parents' thoughts

and feelings while those with divorced parents must be more vigilant,

more attuned to their parents' moods and expectations, more careful to

adjust to the habits of the parent they are with - and more concerned

about looking or acting like the other parent.

 

The debate over how divorce affects children has long been polarized,

with many researchers focusing on statistical data emphasizing that most

children with divorced parents do fine in life and many clinicians

emphasizing the emotional distress that many of the children feel.

 

And given the political overtones, many scholars who study family

diversity have been concerned that focusing on how divorce hurts

children could lead to efforts to restrict the availability of divorce.

 

"Life is filled with trade-offs, and I worry that it's so easy to slip

from descriptions of problems to one-size-fits-all prescription," said

Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College in Washington

and the author of "Marriage, a History.There will always be couples

who need divorces."

 

Ms. Coontz and others acknowledge the growing consensus that most

children with divorced parents grow into successful adults - but say

that the process is difficult for them.

 

"The key is to separate pain from pathology, " said Robert Emery,

director of the Center for Children, Families and the Law at the

University of Virginia. "While a great many young people from divorced

families report painful memories and ongoing troubles regarding family

relationships, the majority are psychologically normal."

 

Mr. Emery's own smaller, local studies have had findings similar to Ms.

Marquardt's. About half of those from divorced families agreed that they

had a "harder childhood that most people," compared with 14 percent from

married families.

 

"The effects of divorce may not seem so important in a hard-nosed

statistical analysis of outcomes, but in a subjective way, they may be

very important," said Andrew Cherlin, a family demographer at Johns

Hopkins University. "Many adults with very successful lives still carry

the residual trauma of their parents' breakup."

 

Ms. Marquardt's book paints a detailed picture of the kinds of tensions

children live with, using examples both from her own life - her parents

separated when she was 2 - and from interviews with 70 other young adults.

 

A chapter on secrets begins with her memory of being 10 years old, at

the kitchen table with her father and not knowing what to answer when he

asked, "Is Paul living with you and your mother?"

 

She recounts her efforts to remember that in her mother's house, it was

all right to say "screwed up" while in her father's she would be

corrected to "messed up."

 

The lonely task of reconciling two worlds is a constant theme. One young

woman in the book describes moving between her mother and stepfather's

home, where thrift was a high value, and her father and stepmother's,

where money flowed freely and abundance was valued. She took her

mother's rules so seriously that even at meals with her father, she ate

far more than she wanted, getting a stomachache in her effort to make

sure there would be no leftovers to throw out. She never told her

parents about her inner conflict, for fear that it would be rude.

 

"Children of divorce feel less protected by their parents, and they're

much less likely to go to their parents for comfort when they are young,

or for emotional support when they are older," Ms. Marquardt said. "They

often feel a need to protect their mother emotionally."

 

"I think we need to recognize these things," she said. "In one women's

magazine, a mother wrote that she'd told her 7-year old-daughter she

didn't need protecting, but that her daughter just does it anyway.

Saying those words isn't helpful to the daughter. It just makes her look

silly, like it's her problem that she feels she has to protect her mom."