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I must have missed the 1970s. I was there, but mostly as a teenager, and I gather that for adults it was a time of free love and fabulous license, when divorce, in particular, was as common and casual as trading in a used car, a decision people made without thought to the impact on their kids. That would explain the frenzy of books, magazine articles and headlines proclaiming that divorce hurts children, which to my sober 1990s sensibilities has a bit of a "Dog Bites Man" ring. What is the news here? Of course divorce hurts kids, but so does having a depressed mom or constantly bickering parents; so does alcoholism and child abuse. What we don't know is whether divorce hurts kids more than the alternative, and that's a judgment that can only be made family by family. The news that divorce is hard on kids could only be surprising to someone cryogenically frozen while watching "An Unmarried Woman," someone like Mike Myers' goofy Austin Powers, who might believably wake up and say, "Let's shag, baby -- I don't give a damn about the kids!" The most recent example of shock (shock!) over the news that divorce hurts kids was a flurry of articles about psychologist Judith Wallerstein's latest work, a 21-page paper on 26 children of divorce -- the youngest kids in her ongoing study of 60 Marin County families who split in the 1970s -- released at a conference on family law in June. Wallerstein's slim paper, based on her tiny Marin subsample, made the front pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner, the front of the Style sections in the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, and the reporters are still calling. "The Baltimore Sun was here last night at 7; La Republica wants an interview," a worn-out Wallerstein told me in the living room of her bright Belvedere, Calif., home, looking out over the San Francisco Bay. "I can't keep up with the requests. I really wasn't prepared for this." What did Wallerstein find? Half the group of 26 developed drug or alcohol problems in their teens, but all recovered. A third never made it to college. Most are still single, in their late 20s or early 30s, and struggling with intimacy. Reporters breathlessly recounted Wallerstein's findings, undaunted by the size of her sample, or the lack of a control group. "Study reveals deep scars of divorce," said the Chronicle headline. "The trauma experienced by young children when their parents break up makes it difficult for them to weather the challenges of adolescence and early adulthood," the Post concluded. The Examiner said the study "challenges society's basic perceptions of the impact of divorce." How did the struggles of 26 Marin children become news from coast to coast? I have always been perplexed by the wide influence of Wallerstein's deep but demographically narrow research, which draws on 60 white families in a county so sui generis the late Herb Caen chronicled its eccentricities under the category "Only in Marin." But the uncritical recounting of her latest findings pushed me to try to understand the phenomenon. I crawled out from under the enormous chip on my shoulder -- I'm a divorced mother and, like 60 percent of divorced women, I was the instigator -- to get a copy of the psychologist's latest report. I went to Belvedere prepared to do battle with the Oracle of the Obvious, this woman who preaches that divorce hurts kids, as though she's the only one smart or compassionate enough to care. But her findings turned out to be more interesting and provocative than the writing about them, and I was on to another mystery: Why are we such gluttons for bad news about divorce? And why do we resist what's really obvious: that there are steps we can take to minimize divorce's bad effects on kids, if we're serious about helping children, rather than harassing people to stay married? Judith Wallerstein is hard to dislike, even for a divorced mother like me with a chip on her shoulder. Petite and gray-haired, in a purple and gray print dress belted at her tiny waist, the 75-year-old grandmother is driven by her work and devoted to the 131 children of divorce whose struggles she has chronicled since 1972. "I am, in effect, the tribal elder who was there at the major battles of their lives, who carries their history, including their earliest fantasy dreams and fears, in my keeping," she writes in this latest report. She takes herself, and her work, dead seriously. She brooks no criticism of her methodology, her small sample group, their Only-in-Marin singularity. "People say, 'There's no control group.' Well, how would you put together a control group for this -- 60 families with the same problems, the same age kids, the same income, who stayed together? It's impossible." Actually, researchers handle comparable challenges all the time, but Wallerstein is less scientist than ethnographer, chronicling her Marin County subculture for 25 years with boundless curiosity. "You couldn't follow a larger group with the intensity we wanted. Anyway, all the big national studies back up my stuff. In fact, they find even worse outcomes for kids of divorce." Wallerstein is right about that last point. Every divorcing parent has to reckon with a growing body of evidence that as a group, children of divorce are more likely to drop out of school, suffer drug and alcohol problems, require psychotherapy and get divorced themselves than children from intact families. Studies also show that kids from high-conflict marriages fare even worse than children of divorce, but that's little comfort if your goal is raising healthy kids, not kids less damaged than they could be. Clearly, divorce hurts children, but it's also clear that if we understand what about divorce is particularly hard on kids, we can hurt them less. Too many studies lump together children of divorce who fall into poverty, whose fathers disappear, whose mothers slide into depression, whose lives change terribly, with kids whose parents can afford two households, whose dads remain involved, whose moms stay reasonably happy, whose housing, schooling, day care and social lives otherwise stay the same. Kids like mine, for instance. Wallerstein's small sample contains some wisdom about what hurts kids, but reporters mainly missed it in their rush to declare divorce a life-long disaster. One conclusion is inescapable: The fathers in her sample proved stunningly inept both as providers and nurturers. Only six of 26 provided for their kids' college educations, though virtually all could afford it. Most proved unable to maintain a close relationship with their children once the tie to their mothers was severed. Some disappeared, while others insisted on rigid custody schedules their kids resented. In adulthood, only five of the young people said they would turn to their fathers for personal advice. By contrast, most remained close to their mothers, though they worried she had sacrificed too much on their behalf. "The instability of father-child relationships that emerges in this long-term study is troublesome," Wallerstein concluded. The failure to provide for college was most tangibly troublesome. The six young people whose college educations were paid for, Wallerstein found, made much easier transitions to adulthood. "Their pride and self-confidence, and the sense of excitement in their lives, were in striking contrast to the clearly apparent mood of resignation in their less fortunate peers," she writes. After the refusal to pay for college, the next most troubling failure of fathers, and some mothers, was insisting on rigid custody arrangements that met their needs, but not those of their children. Why did reporters ignore this disturbing, if mostly anecdotal, indictment of post-divorce fatherhood? "That's a good question," Wallerstein says. "Divorce is political, and politically we're back to being concerned about the rights of fathers. And I'm not about male-bashing. I know these men. They aren't villains. They all paid child support, though it wasn't set very high. They would sit right here in my living room and I'd ask them: 'Why didn't you pay for John's college?' And they'd tell me: 'I did what was legally required of me, Judy. Enough already.'" Sadly, doing what's "legally required" makes these men exemplary, since most divorced fathers don't pay child support. They aren't villains, but they aren't good fathers, either. Why are our expectations so low? Wallerstein's findings suggest some obvious reforms. One is to mandate support from both parents through college, especially in families with the means to provide for higher education. "Fathers' rights groups don't like this idea, but women's groups aren't pushing for it either," Wallerstein notes. "A lot of mothers are afraid they'll get less now if they push for more later." Another clear conclusion is that custody arrangements need regular adjustment and increased input from kids, especially as adolescence looms. Shuttling between two households may not work for older children whose priorities become sports, after-school fun and their friends, and parents have to be creative about finding new ways to maintain strong relationships as they lose their central role in their child's life. "In a normal family, somebody says to Jimmy, 'What do you want to do Sunday? How do you want to spend your vacation?' But in divorced families it's too often, 'You're with Dad Sunday and all summer, too.' And the kids feel powerless. The parents remain center stage, when developmentally they're supposed to become less important." Wallerstein's findings about fathers are less easily remedied by reform. They're a reminder that fatherhood doesn't come naturally, that most Western customs around marriage and monogamy have been a way to compel men to share their resources -- and hopefully some of their time and love -- with offspring who belong to them. "To this day, whether it's nature or nurture, women are the mediators in families, and kids don't do as well in households with only fathers," Wallerstein says. "It's the mother who says, 'Leave your father alone, he had a hard day,' or tells the father, 'Tell Jimmy you're proud of his grades.'" But even if her study seems to exonerate divorced mothers -- and it feels good to get that chip off my shoulder -- I come back to the fact that her sample is small and her results are probably dated. Most of the divorced dads I know, and especially my ex, are much more available and nurturing than fathers of the previous generation, and their kids can't help but do better than the 26 in Wallerstein's sample -- who, by the way, didn't do so badly, despite the hand-wringing headlines. Wallerstein's not so sure. I ask her, "Isn't it true that what really puts kids at risk is not divorce itself, but having a mother who gets depressed, a father who's much less involved, a sudden change in living standards, high parental conflict ...?" She cuts me off with an indulgent smile. "Well, yes, but you're describing divorce. How do you get divorced without any of those things happening?" "It's possible," I tell her. Of course, I'm describing my own situation, and I realize that, chip on my shoulder or not, I have a stake in having a good divorce. Wallerstein realizes it too, and graciously grants me that.
"It is possible. But it takes a lot of work. A good divorce is
about as much work as a good marriage. My research doesn't point to
restricting divorce. Divorce isn't going away. My work points to the
complexity of divorcing and doing it right for the children."
Joan Walsh is associate editor of Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to Salon. Her work has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, the Los Angeles Times and many other newspapers and magazines. She lives in San Francisco with her daughter, Nora. Are "good divorces" possible? Are men more to blame for bad divorces? Discuss in Table Talk. |
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