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.)
Depends on how selfish each spouse is. Time away from my ex=wife coaching my boys in sports was time away from her. She was so self-centered, the reason didn't matter to her.
What I see in this article, where the children of divorce felt children were not at the center of their family, was that it was "adults first" in a negative way (rather than the positive you depict). I've observed adult relatives who divorced put their own needs and desires first -- leading to divorce -- and in that sense children *should* be at the center of a family.
Oh, yes....and I just love it when a couple divorces but says...."We're still friends." Well, if you're "still friends" STAY MARRIED! For the kids!
It takes two to make a baby, Sham. Don't put the onus on the woman alone. What is wrong is sex without already having a real commitment to each other, honed from coming to know each other over a decent period of time. That is the wrong decision, not whether or not to have the child so conceived.
Actually I feel most of the "detritus" so to speak comes from people who are incapable of handling delayed gratification. Children mean sacrifices, for years. They mean joy also but the sacrifices are very real for all involved. When people grow up in a society where instant gratification is rife, the sacrifices are even more difficult.
Why go through the process of courtship and discovery when today you can barely know each other's names and still get her/him in the sack? Then, if a child results, people try to be honorable and marry but they weren't really compatible because the only compatibility they checked for was sexual. Sex in a relationship is important but it can't carry the whole weight of the long-term requirements of parenting.
Add to that the total media focus that life happens from years 20-40 (prime child-rearing years) or at least looking and acting like 20-40, and you have tremendous pressure that leads to resenting the children holding you back from that "ideal" life.
Actually, it doesn't take two to make a baby. It takes a woman who chooses not to take precautions for reasons of her own.
+
My 6 yo dd is still trying to make sense of the divorce of her favorite aunt and uncle. She still cries over the loss of Uncle Michael, asks if he left because he didn't like her, and reminds me to pray for him every night. If this little girl is taking this divorce so hard, my heart breaks for the millions of children whose own parents split up.
Okay. So how does that paternity test work then?
Aint that the truth.
Unless you've lived through it, or rather are living through it, it can't be comprehended nor should it be.
If a young man gets involved sexually with a girl, he'd better know she isn't the desperate type. In other words, harsh as it sounds, blame yourselves.
The FIRST decent thing we can do for children is to give them a married mother and father, IMO. Single parenthood and divorce cause so much pain. I've witnessed enough of it to know.
I know some girls who when they have boyfriends who wont commit or want to step up the relationship will get pregnant on purpose(ie stop taking the birth control pills) so they guy is stuck with her. Of course the guy then marries her but ultimately some of them realize there not compatible and divorce screwing the kids over. If only more people chose to wait until marriage to engage in sexual behavior this problem would be much less severe. When relationships are based heavily on the physical intimacy it leaves very little room to really get to know the other person.
>>>Let me ask you this... Suppose Mom & Dad decide that owning a new boat would make them both incredibly happy, but the costs would leave less money for the kids' education, clothing and activities. Should the parents buy the boat? Should parental happiness always take precedence?>>>
Now who is oversimplifying things? I did not mean "happy" in the sense of personal gratification, I mean "happy" in the content/secure way of being in a solid stable relationship. But you can split hairs and be argumentative just for the sake of it all day. You go ahead and ignore your spouse all for the sake of your children's happiness (and the same can be said for the child wanting a new toy at the expense that can't be afforded, I'm sure you didn't mean it that way no more than I did).
>>>I've observed adult relatives who divorced put their own needs and desires first -- leading to divorce -- and in that sense children *should* be at the center of a family.>>>
I agree! I've seen adults who put going out and partying and sleeping around above spending time with their kids. Or put ANYTHING above spending time with their kids, that is obviously not what I meant.
OK, too extreme - 40 lashes with a wet noodle and thrown in the dust bin of history.
I also graduated HS in 1977, and there were times that I thought I was weird because I was one of the few kids who didn't have braces or live in a divorced household.
Indeed!
What about the man? Is he immune to the responsibility of taking "precautions"?
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