But what about younger children who might not exhibit any “telltale” signs of aggression? Would a preschooler pick up a gun and shoot another child or himself? According to Marjorie Hardy, assistant professor of psychology at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., the answer is yes — especially if your child is a boy.

In 1995 and 1996, she and her students conducted studies in Charlotte, N.C., to determine how best to prevent young children from playing with guns. By educating the children, all between the ages of 4 and 7, they expected to cause them to steer clear of guns. Instead, when left together in a room with a real, unloaded gun, as well as toys and other familiar items, 65 percent of the 130 children in the studies played with the weapon. Only 35 percent went to find an adult when they saw the gun, and they were mostly girls. In May 1999, three years later, Hardy’s study was re-created at her son’s day-care facility by ABC’s “20/20.” The results were the same.

Why did these children play with guns? Perhaps it was simply because they were told not to. Critics of Hardy’s studies have pointed out that the children were tempted to play with guns because it was a safe setting — their day care. But many children commit crimes each year using guns found in their own homes — another supposedly safe place.

Hardy has concluded that education alone is not enough to deter kids from playing with guns. She suggests that parents monitor their children more closely and set parameters for their behavior. But even that may not be sufficient: When Hardy’s own 4-year-old son was faced with the chance to play with a gun, he did. Afterwards, he lied about it. Salon Mothers Who Think spoke to Hardy by phone to find out more about her studies and why she thinks kids play with guns.

What was the purpose of the studies you and your students conducted in 1995 and 1996?

We set out to try to decrease children’s fascination and playing with guns. In the first study, we had 60 kids. Half the kids listened to a policeman talk about the dangers of guns and the other half didn’t. Then we put them together to see if the ones who’d heard about the danger of guns could persuade the ones that hadn’t heard not to play with the guns. What we found was that it didn’t work. Just hearing a policeman talk about the dangers of guns wasn’t sufficient.

In the second study [of 70 different children] we thought maybe they needed more education. We spent five days educating them about how to make good choices, how to be assertive without being aggressive, how to resist peer pressure. There was a lot of positive feedback when they role-played these situations. Then we videotaped them again, and again we found that it didn’t make a difference.

The bottom line from the educational standpoint is that education alone is not sufficient to deter children from playing with guns.

When kids are told not to do something, they have a tendency to want to go and do it.

I’m sure that’s part of it, and that’s why we do things like lock up liquor and lock up medicine. But we have parents who don’t lock up guns. There’s definitely the novelty part of it, especially when you’re forbidden to do something. So there are some parents who argue that if they take their kids to a shooting range and they let them see the power of a gun, their kids will have a respect for the gun and won’t be so curious anymore because they’ve already fired it and it’s not that big a deal. Does that work? I don’t know. It’s difficult to test.

What did the kids do with the guns? Did they just look at them? Point and shoot?

They shot at other kids, shot themselves, shot up the room. The kids who played with the guns became more aggressive overall, verbally and physically. They called each other names, kicked the toys.

At about what age do kids realize the difference between a real and a toy gun?

As part of the studies we asked the kids to identify the guns as real or pretend and we found that almost all of the 4-year-olds thought the guns were toys. About half the 5-year-olds thought the real guns were toys and by the time they were 6 or 7, they could tell the difference. That didn’t stop them from playing with them, though.

How realistic are the results of the study, considering that children usually don’t just find guns lying around?

What prompted the first study was that the children in that day care had found a gun a few weeks previously that was lying on the ground outside their day care for some reason. They had picked it up before they told the teacher about it. We want kids not even to touch the gun because it could go off. Most of the time kids aren’t going to find them lying around. They’re more likely going to find them in a bedside drawer, at the top of a closet.

But it’s difficult to test this. What I was more interested in finding out was, if they did find one just sitting there, would they touch it? They had just been told that, even in a setting that is safe, even if you’re at home or in day care, if you find a gun, you need to not touch it. You need to go get an adult. In that essence, it was a little unrealistic. Some people criticize the study, saying it’s not fair to leave them lying around in an area where they feel safe, where they are allowed to explore the other toys and items. But most parents don’t tell their kids that they can’t go into their dresser drawers or a particular area of the house. I have a 4-year-old and he’s never gone into my dresser drawers as far as I know, but I’ve never told him he can’t and they’re not locked up.

Based on the results of your studies, what would you suggest is the best way for parents to keep their children safe from guns?

I don’t think you can teach really young kids safety just because they can’t really distinguish between fantasy and reality. They don’t have a concept of death as being a permanent thing. Really what parents need to do is monitor their kids and keep their guns locked away.

You do need to continually educate your child and hope that somewhere, somehow it seeps in. We did have some kids who did leave the room and tell an adult there were guns there. Thirty-five percent didn’t play with them, or got an adult. They were usually the girls.

In the first study, though, in 1995, there was no difference — about an equal number of boys and girls played with the gun. In the second study it was mostly boys. Generally, I would say yes, boys are more likely to pick up and play with a gun. I think that lack of finding in the first study is probably unusual, but that doesn’t mean that girls won’t play with guns.

Were you surprised that your own son played with a gun when given the chance?

Yes and no. I think for some reason the part that really took me aback was seeing the other kids shoot him. I think what surprised me was not so much that he played with the gun, but how he really got into it. He was saying things like “Kill this, kill that, shoot,” just like any other boy.

Why do you think boys have such a fascination with guns?

I think it’s their role models — look at the role models on television. They’re taught from a very early age to act out rather than express their feelings, or cry or talk about them.

We don’t encourage boys to express themselves any other way than physically. I do believe some of it is testosterone. My son couldn’t be raised in a less violent atmosphere than our home, I don’t think. We don’t watch violent television, we don’t allow him to watch violent television, he doesn’t have any action figures. The child doesn’t really even know who Batman is. And yet, we’ve been called into school because he’s hurt his friends.

What are parents and adults up against when they try to teach kids not to play with guns?

It’s definitely a “Do as I say, not as I do” type situation. There need to be distinctions between parents and children. We tell kids not to drink and then we drink — and that’s OK. We need to say, “You don’t drink until you’re a grown-up.” Kids need to realize that there are some things that grown-ups can do that kids can’t and grown-ups need to realize that kids are going to imitate their actions more than they’re going to heed their words.

We have some choices to make as parents. Do we want to set a good example by our behavior? Or do we want to assume that the kids should know the difference?

I get a lot [of flak] from NRA people and gun rights advocates saying it’s not fair to say people shouldn’t own guns. That’s not what I’m saying. My dad owns a gun — some people have to own guns because that’s what they do for a living. That’s what my dad did, he was a police officer.

What I am saying is that if you’re going to own a gun and you have small kids or you’re going to have small kids in your house, you have a responsibility to make sure that that gun is safe.

Older children — say, older than 10 — have a better understanding of the dangers of guns. So why is it that they still seek them out, carry them and use them?

Children have a sense of invulnerability, through adolescence and even in their 20s. Kids know if they drink and drive they could die, but they still do it. There’s a sense of “Maybe it’s dangerous but nothing will happen to me.”

Why do you think we’re seeing this rash of gun threats and shootings?

After Columbine, it’s certainly copycat. I’m just grateful that summer’s here, although I worry about the media bringing a lot of attention to the situation when schools go back in session next fall. There are going to be articles saying, “Are schools safer now?” and “Should your child go back to school?” And it’s just going to open a can of worms again.

I wonder if we’re going to see an increase in home schooling. It’s going to be a pretty sad day when we’re afraid to even let our children leave the home to go to school.

In other words: The Net bums you out!

Unlike the notorious “cyberporn” study that emerged from Carnegie Mellon in 1995 only to have its trustworthiness and methodology blasted to bits by online critics, the HomeNet study — which will appear this week in the American Psychologist (there’s a draft online at the HomeNet site) — isn’t riddled with gaping holes, massive fallacies and crafty distortions. But before we all conclude that the Internet is hazardous to our mental health, it’s worth pondering some of the many questions about the HomeNet study that weren’t raised in the initial Times coverage — and that don’t seem to be getting heard as that article echoes through the mediasphere thanks to CNN, AP, the BBC and others.

First of all, the statistically significant changes the researchers report are quite small — like a 1 percent increase on the depression scale for people who spend an hour a week online. (We’re not talking about clinical-level, fire-up-the-Prozac style depression here.) The study attempts to find subtle gradations on the basis of the kind of “How are you feeling today on a scale of one to five?” quizzes that psychologists like to use to measure people’s moods — and anyone who’s ever taken one of those tests knows it’s hardly an exact science. The researchers only tested people twice, at the start and the end of the two-year study — which doesn’t provide a very wide set of data points to offset the impact of other factors (time of year, state of the economy, random personal crises). Teenagers, unsurprisingly, tended to spend more time online and also show a greater rate of loneliness and depression — and that could easily account for the correlation the researchers found between increased Net use and dampened moods.

Beyond these statistical issues, there’s a deeper problem with the study’s basic setup. The researchers chose to limit their subjects to people who hadn’t been online before, because they wanted to perform a “before and after” kind of study that would help them isolate the specific effect of Net use on individual psyches. So the participants in the study weren’t people who simply chose to get online because they had some motivation to do so; they were people who got free computers and Internet access so they could be studied.

It’s tough to know exactly what direction that would skew the study toward — but easy to see that there’s an unnatural premise at the heart of the research. One obvious problem is that the researchers have no idea whether their subjects got bummed out because of what they encountered on the Net, or simply because they wound up sitting in front of a computer monitor rather than working in their gardens or playing ball. Is the increase in “loneliness and depression” caused by the Internet itself or simply by computer use, regardless of whether the modem’s on? The study can’t say.

By far the biggest flaw in the HomeNet research, however, is the way it lumps all Internet usage into one big heap. Using the Net to organize a charity drive or a political campaign is a different experience from using it to stare at pornography (as if anyone would do the latter with a bunch of psychologists watching). Building your own Web site is different from pounding on a search engine hunting down some obscure fact. There is no uniform “Internet experience,” and you can’t draw conclusions about how time on the Net affects people’s psyches until you know what people are doing with that time.

The researchers have suggested one explanation for their results: In spending more time on the Net, people are trading the “strong” social bonds of face-to-face friendships and relationships for the “weak” ties of the disembodied online realm — and that may ultimately leave them feeling more isolated. There’s some good sense in that observation. But the “weakness” of online ties is a relative matter: The report also notes that going online may help broaden the social support network for people who live in more isolated locales than, say, Pittsburgh.

Much of the utopian rhetoric about online community emerged from spaces like the Well and Echo — communities that have geographical centers (the Well in the Bay Area, Echo in New York) and that don’t permit anonymity. The long-term denizens of such communities will snort with derision at the idea that the friendships and relationships they’ve built there are any less “real” or valuable than those they’ve built offline. (My own critique of the HomeNet study draws from the spirited discussions of it this week on the Well.)

But such happy experiences can’t easily be duplicated in forums and online environments that have rapidly shifting populations, easy access to anonymity and no geographical center of gravity. Without those characteristics that knit an online space into the fabric of offline life, the online “community” can readily descend into flame-throwing anarchy and alienating mind games. Depressing? You bet.

As the Internet grows, we will be faced with a complex choice between two visions of the new communications medium: Is it going to evolve into the vast postmodern playground of shifting identity that scholars like Sherry Turkle have mapped — a no-place where everyone can be whatever they want, and nobody means anything to anyone else? Or is it going to emerge as an extension of our real-world lives, overcoming barriers of time and distance but not obliterating our feelings of identity, connection and responsibility toward one another?

The HomeNet researchers say they’re moving forward with follow-up studies. Here’s a tip for them: Don’t give headline writers an excuse to translate minute percentage deviations in a tiny, unscientific sample population into exciting discoveries of whole “worlds” of emotional distress. Don’t just tally the hours people spend on the Net, but track where they go and what they do with their time. Look at the differences between people who frequent anonymous chat rooms and those who join real communities. Then, and only then, ask them if they’re happy.

Tor Norretranders is the Danish James Gleick — a writer who knows a Big Idea when he sees it and possesses the skill to neuter that idea’s thorny patches without babying his readers. His “The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size” — a bestseller in Denmark following its original publication in 1991 — is the result of just such a science writer’s “eureka!”

Norretranders could scarcely have done better than to stumble across the “user illusion,” a notion he copped from Alan Kay, the interface-design guru. According to Kay: “The ‘user illusion’ … is the simplified myth everyone builds to explain … the system’s actions and what should be done next.” Blending information theory, neuroscience, cosmology, physics, theology and a grab bag of thumbnail philosophy, Norretranders sets out to demonstrate that human consciousness is an overbuffed example of just such a user illusion.

“Consciousness,” he argues, “is a fraud,” a liar that deceives us into believing that it runs the show when in fact it lags significantly behind unconscious decision making (as a groundbreaking and controversial series of experiments by Benjamin Libet revealed). Only a half-second behind, but that’s enough to play havoc with the continuum of human assumptions about how our heads work. If, for instance, consciousness is the mental equivalent of a con man, convincing us — in Norretranders-speak — that our narcissistic “I,” not our intuitive “Me,” is the boss, what happens to free will?

This concerns Norretranders — but what really has him worried is the fundamental irony that the user illusion foists on the Information Age. Joining a discussion of Maxwell’s demon (a thermodynamic problem that has vexed scientists since the mid-19th century) with some trendier current lingo, Norretranders warns that man has “moved down to a lower bandwidth, and he is getting bored.” Consciousness, naturally, is at fault, implying that it’s tapped into a vast river of data when in truth our subliminal experiences are considerably richer. “The ability of consciousness to assimilate the world,” Norretranders writes, “has been seriously overestimated by our scientific culture.”

This salvo has grave implications for practically everything that people do, even the goofy stuff. Remember listening to those old Led Zeppelin or Beatles albums when you were a sullen teen, anxiously struggling to discern the backward-masked, supposedly satanic messages? It turns out that the usually futile effort was, once again, consciousness getting in the way. It’s not that you need to try hard to catch subliminal information; subliminal information is everywhere, all the time. Consciousness simply dupes you into believing that it isn’t. The real world is backward-masked.

Norretranders differs from the standard American science scribe in his willingness to surrender the pretense of objectivity to an agenda. As his subtitle indicates, he’s no friend of haughty consciousness, with its embrace of strict, low-bandwidth reason, straight lines and keyboard drudgery. Instead, he craves sexy fractals, shills for nonlinear thinking and wallows in the freestyle cognition of pro soccer players — all because be feels that they represent more accurately the truth of human experience. “There is a terrain between order and chaos,” he writes, “a vast undiscovered continent — the continent of complexity. The precondition for discovering it is that we learn to steer between the two poles of our worldview — order and randomness, supervision and surprise, map and terrain, science and our everyday lives.”

But he also indulges in a whole series of annoying sci-writer clichés during his crusade to prove that the “epoch of the I is drawing to a close.” One is an obsession with paradox. Given that much of contemporary science traffics in little else, a certain procedural devotion to these noisome little bastards should be expected. But Norretranders — whose style is already scattershot and aphoristic — is a paradox monger. My personal favorite: “As only the conscious is conscious, and consciousness has to be the result of cerebral mechanisms so boring that we are unconscious of them, consciousness can ever be in charge.” Or: “What we experience is a lie, for we experience it as if we experienced it before we experienced it.”

Worse by far, however, is his tendency to rely on the language of formalism — a rather tight-assed confederate of mighty consciousness — to describe as “beautiful,” “elegant” or “sublime” almost every momentous scientific discovery or vital equation. He also thinks Manhattan is an example of a linear civilization — which means he probably hasn’t ever abandoned himself to the subliminal subversion of the West Village, where you can find 4th Street intersecting with 13th Street.

Norretranders, of course, would dismiss such skepticism as further evidence that “consciousness is depth experienced as surface,” and he would have some extremely provocative science on his side. At the very least, he has produced a lively story about the extreme frontiers of research in many different fields. He may have locked himself in a potentially disastrous bind — asserting that consciousness is no big deal while producing a hefty tome that showcases his supreme control over his own knowledge. He extricates himself skillfully from this awkward position, however, so of one aspect of Norretrander’s personal “I” we can be sure: this is a science writer whose enthusiasm for his work is happy to displace his meager consciousness.

What else do you need to know about me — other than that I’ve been spending far too many hours taking online personality tests?

Such tests have been a fad for some time, probably starting with the infamous “Purity” tests that became a Web hit after being popular on college campuses for at least a decade. To be precise, I’m talking about free, multiple-choice personality tests that provide results directly online and often don’t take more than 15 minutes or so to complete. Dozens now exist on the Web — more if you count the numerous parodies and corporate knockoffs.

Anyone who grew up addicted to the Cosmo quiz and has some free time can get a few kicks out of the exercise. Some may well find these tests useful — even comforting — in a generic sort of way (personality “typing,” by definition, places you within an identifiably large group).

The most popular test — numbers aren’t easy to come by — appears to be the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. David Mark Keirsey developed the site and is the son of psychologist David W. Keirsey, who penned the 70-question test for his 1984 book “Please Understand Me.” He says nearly 3 million people have taken it online in the last year and a half. Tabulated results from about 540,000 of those can be found on the site.

While many people say they take the Keirsey test as a lark, the four temperaments and 16 “variants” that form its categorization system are popping up all around the Net. One can now find routine mentions of Keirsey temperament results in online risumis and occasionally in e-mail signature files. Lengthy discussions about members’ “types” have filled newsgroups as varied as alt.gothic, alt.tv.nothern.exposure and (unsurprisingly) alt.support.depression. A college professor is collecting Keirsey results from anyone with a personal Web site; and you can find pages devoted to cataloging the temperaments of online diarists and fantasy-game aficionados, among others.

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Obviously, simple accessibility is the primary reason Keirsey’s and similar tests are so popular online. David Mark Keirsey cites, in particular, the Web’s openness to “ideas not from the mainstream academic or commercial institutions” (personality tests not offered by a practitioner in a face-to-face setting are still frowned on by the psychological establishment). Those on the Web, as in “real life,” may also be drawn to the idea of “belonging” to an identifiable type or a group and the feeling of affirmation that inspires.

But there could be more to why personality tests hold such a strong appeal for Net users: They may help fill a void at the heart of online communication. According to Marlene Maheu, a clinical psychologist with a strong interest in health issues online who is also publisher of the Web magazine Self-Help & Psychology, “People online are looking for quick and easy answers, for abbreviated-type interaction.” We’ve all felt the need for some common shorthand for describing ourselves to virtual friends, and Keirsey results are more fun to share than whether one is, say, for or against Microsoft — and arguably more enlightening.

Most such tests are amusing and typically harmless — though you may want to avoid those that require a name and address (as does the Church of Scientology’s tortuous 200-question version). Still, Maheu, who sits on the American Psychological Association’s professional practice standards committee, decries online tests’ lack of accountability. “What if a person gets depressed or decides to change jobs as a result of taking one of them?” she asks.

Kathryn, who collected Keirsey results on alt.support.depression (and who, like most of that newsgroup’s participants, posts using only her first name), says that, judging by the newsgroup member’s reactions, “A majority of them were taking the Sorter for fun, but there were some who really analyzed the results and applied it to themselves. Some said things like, ‘Well, I took the test last year and was an X; then when I took it today I was a Y.’ People didn’t know what to think about the fact that their results changed, and discredited the test, saying that they would constantly get different results depending on what kind of day they were having.”

According to an article by Linda V. Berens on the site of the Temperament Research Group, the Keirsey test has an “error” rate of at least 25 percent, which means that in cases where the test is administered by a practitioner “and a feedback session is conducted … the instrument results do not match the confirmed and/or observed type about 25 percent of the time.” A one-in-four failure rate seems high. Yet, in the same article, Berens defends the Keirsey temperament theory as “reflecting patterns of behavior that have been described by many great thinkers for over 25 centuries.”

The Keirsey Sorter and a test with which it is often associated, the similar but much longer Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (a popular psychometric tool used mostly by corporations but that cannot be taken online), are both based, at least in part, on Carl Jung’s psychological type theory of personality. Jung classified people according to their preferred modes of thinking and perceiving, relying heavily on the concept of opposition. He maintained that polarity is the source of psychic energy (the Keirsey and MBTI tests force you to choose between two answers in every instance). Jung coined the terms extrovert and introvert to refer to what he considered the central opposing characteristics of personality.

Jung’s type theory holds a lot of appeal and has seeped into our modern consciousness. While critics may see the Keirsey test as a form of “psychological Trivial Pursuit,” others may find it makes accessible to the common Web surfer theories of temperament that touch on apparently universal truths. Just don’t take the results too, well, personally. Even the Keirsey site describes the Sorter as, at best, “a preliminary and rough indicator of personality.”

Wally Glenn, a self-described test junkie who devotes a portion of his home page to listing (mostly parodic) online personality measurements, is still waiting for his ideal test: “One that comes back with an answer like, ‘You have a tendency to take online personality tests.’”

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.”