Posted on 10/11/2005 6:31:45 PM PDT by WarEagle
DIVORCE STUDY BREAKS NEW GROUND
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.
(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at MaggieBox2004@yahoo.com.)
Ping
Well, many [if not most] of these families should have never been, to begin with. Existing family law "helps", too.
>>>Children were at the center of my family"
Children should not be at the center of the family. Children should be loved, cared for and taken care of, but not the center. You will not be doing your children any good and most likely this 'children at the center of the family' is what is causing most divorces. Ed Young has a good seminar regarding this issue. It's called Kid CEO and it did wonders for my whole family. When my husband and I centered ourselves and our focus on God, our children became much happier.
And what do people grow up to be like who live with two parents who obviously seethe with contempt and hatred for each other?
Of course kids have a better shot at life in a happy home, but divorces don't break up happy homes.
So9
Anyone with any commom sense knows divorce generally is not good for children. I had an aunt and uncle who divorced when I was nine and I was terrified my parents would do the same. I cried myself to sleep one night fretting about it. My parents never divorced. But I was horrified by the thought. It made no sense to me how such a thing could be. My husbands parents divorced. Even though I love them both and they never remarried and stayed and ran a family business together it was odd and caused strife that would not have been in the family. The best time of my life was childood. The most carefree,secure and happy time. By the way I graduated HS in 1977 and not one of the 100 kids who graduated had divored parents. Sad to say it is not that way now.
None of this is a surprise. The sad effects of divorce on children really never wear off. They can remake their lives, find religion, have a happy family, build a successful career, experience happiness, but that inner loneliness will never go away in this life.
The children were the center of my family. No matter how mad I was at my children's father, I would never have removed him from their lives. I knew I had to keep my marriage intact for my happiness and theirs. I had no right to kick their father out. They love their dad, so I made our marriage work. Without childern it would have been very easy to leave. The children are "entitled" to both parents in the home and parents should do everything to keep the family intacted. Staying married is an obligation to your children's lives, just as schooling, religion, and good health.
Good point. My father grew up in a household where his parents loathed each other but stayed together for the sake of the kids. It was bad enough that at the dinner table his mother would ask him to ask his father to pass the salt,even when his father was sitting right there.
My father has a lot of baggage from that, it's almost like a PSTD kind of thing for him.
While definitely a happy home with 2 married parents is by far the best environment for a child, I can't help but think that if things have deteriorated so bad that the parents are living in the same house and not even speaking to each other that maybe divorce would be no worse, and maybe even better, than living in that hell like my father did.
LQ
Honestly. I am extremely reluctant to have my own children. More like terrified...but I really like kids and they like me. I just feel like the risk of there being a regret is just too great.
My folks got divorced when I was 12. I'm 37, happily married with 2 really great step kids that are now adults.
I feel sure that my growing up with incompatiable parents and being the 12yo kid of 3 in a divorce has really tweeked my perspective on being a natural parent.
Thanks for this post. A most interesting insight. It brings to my mind a need for a new study on children who grow up in single mom families where there never was a marriage nor a father figure.
Or, maybe, such a study would not be politically correct.
Exactly. It is an issue of Children's rights
Most companies have turned into divorce factories. Sure was better when mom stayed home with the kids. A lot less traffic on the road too.
Those studies have been done, however, those studies will never see the light of day.
At least you had something to work with. I couldn't make mine work. After boyfriend #3 (that I knew about) I gave up.
You are exactly right. I bet it made your marriage more solid, too.
>>>I think her point is not that a child should run a family...rather than children are a very important reason to resolve issues between parents.<>>>
Very very true. I have two children from a previous marriage (he decided he 'didn't want to be tied down anymore') and my husband has two that he raised alone as well. We have a four year old together and there have been times when we have been ready to throw in the towel. Then we think of how it hurt our older children to split up their family and we just try a little harder to get through a tough time. HER (and the pain of our other children who have become comfortable and stable with their family) feelings and pain is more important than the ease of saying 'forget it'.
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