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Easing the impact of divorce

Children of divorce: 25 years later

A landmark new study that tracked kids from broken homes for a quarter-century finds the negative impact of divorce continues well into adulthood.

by Hara Estroff Marano

"Part of me is always waiting for disaster to strike. ... I live in dread that some terrible loss will change my life." That, according to psychoanalyst Judith Wallerstein, is what divorce sounds like 25 years after the fact, among those it hits hardest -- the children.

Wallerstein, founder of the Center for the Family in Transition in Corte Madera, Calif., is one of the nation's leading experts on divorce. Her new book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (Hyperion, $24.95), contends that divorce marks offspring for life.

Her troubling, inevitably controversial study offers a close-up view of the first generation to grow into adulthood with a 50% divorce rate. Together with other recent studies that have followed large numbers of the children of divorce, it provides some answers to the question: How does divorce affect children?

Each year divorce complicates the lives of more than 1 million Americans under age 18 by creating two households and the need for two newly different relationships with their parents. But the impact can go well beyond that.

• The degree of fallout and its duration depend on a number of factors. Among them:
• The nature of the marriage before the divorce.
• The nastiness and anger caused by the divorce.
• The role of divorced fathers in their children's lives.
• And, above all, the quality of parental support and control before, during and after the divorce.

Long after their parents have parted company, gone on to happier unions or attempted some other version of the good life, the children of divorce, even as adults, are still spinning from its effects, Wallerstein insists.

Karen James was 36 when she detailed to Wallerstein the long shadow cast by her parents' divorce. Like so many other children of divorce, James had embarked on a search for lasting love, yet was so deeply anxious that she was unable to trust others. A fear of abandonment kept her clinging to a string of unsuitable or troubled partners.

Twice before (in her books Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope With Divorce and Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce), Wallerstein had tapped into the lives of Karen James and 130 other children in San Francisco's affluent Marin County suburbs who were between ages 3 and 18 when their parents first separated. And twice before, Wallerstein has told us that divorce abruptly ends kids' childhood, filling it with loneliness and worry about their parents, and hurtling them prematurely and recklessly into adolescence.

"But it's in adulthood that children of divorce suffer the most," Wallerstein contends. Feeling totally unprepared and thoroughly pessimistic, they encounter repeated failure and heartbreak as they dive into adult relationships. With no clues to the type of person they are looking for, they enter and stick with relationships they know are doomed from the start. Even in good relationships, they expect disaster. And they go to pieces over "the mundane differences and inevitable conflicts" found in every close relationship, Wallerstein says.

By the time the children of divorce reach their 30s, she finds, only half are doing well in their personal lives. Interestingly, their work lives are unscathed.

Because only 30% of divorced fathers in her study chipped in for their kids' college educations, Wallerstein predicts a backlash by the children of divorce against their dads, now approaching their senior years. Bitter children threaten to withhold the emotional and financial aid often needed in old age as payback for fathers who did not stay connected. That could have tremendous societal repercussions. "Who," Wallerstein asks, "will take care of an older generation estranged from its children?"

Still, the portrait Wallerstein paints may be too pessimistic and her research methods flawed, others contend. Specifically, her study lacks a control group, so there's no way to know for sure whether all the problems that developed in the children of divorce stem from the divorce, from other aspects of their lives or from the normal perturbations of young adulthood.

In the short term, divorce is always troublesome for children, says Mavis Hetherington, doyenne of divorce researchers. Now professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Virginia, she has videotaped and scrutinized the workings of 1,400 divorced families since the early 1970s. Hetherington pinpoints a crisis period of about two years in the immediate aftermath of separation when the adults, preoccupied with their own lives, typically take their eye off parenting just when their children are reeling from loss and feeling bewildered.

In fact, divorce actually can be better for the children if there has been a great deal of conflict in the marriage, or if the household is disorganized and chaotic, say sociologists Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth of Pennsylvania State University, who followed 2,000 families for nearly two decades. They found that the kids of high-conflict families whose parents divorce wind up just as happy and do just as well as others their age who grow up with happily married parents.

It's a different story for the children of marriages that were not particularly hostile before a break-up. Typically, the husband and wife were drifting along unhappily, their sex life non-existent -- but they seldom fought. Their kids didn't mind; in fact, they didn't even notice. "Divorce in a low-conflict marriage is just devastating to kids," Amato concludes. Adds William Doherty, professor of family science at the University of Minnesota, "Children are not oriented to the quality of your sex life or whether your spouse is your soul mate."

Doherty says it's "no longer clear" to him that it's fair to the children when parents leave a non-destructive marriage "to pursue your bliss or because you don't want to give children a bad model of marital intimacy."

It's not surprising that the wisest words on divorce may come from a child of divorce herself. Stephanie Staal is a 28-year-old writer who has explored the impact of marital break-up in a new book, The Love They Lost (Delacourt Press, $23). She interviewed 120 adult children of divorce and wound up impressed by the complexity of their reactions. Referring to the wide variation in parental support, household conflict and explanations among her subjects, she observes that "there is no typical divorce. It's the way people do it that defines its effects."

Hara Estroff Marano is editor at large of Psychology Today and editor in chief of the upcoming publication Infantelligence.

Easing the impact of divorce

Advice from America's best experts on divorce and the family:

• Recognize that divorce is not something that has to be settled only once, when the break-up occurs. Children, even adult ones, have a recurring need for information and support at life's major developmental passages.
  
  
• Go out of your way to maintain vigilance and support as a parent. Divorce makes children feel the fragility of emotional bonds.
  
  
• After divorce, children are even more in need of what they couldn't get before: a sense of their two parents collaborating on their behalf. Continuing conflict is a stress that can derail development.
  
  
• Keep your children connected to the extended family of the non-custodial parent; they need aunts and uncles and grandparents. Think of it as social capital: The more they have, the easier life is for everyone.
  
  
• As children head into adolescence and beyond, explain generally -- not in sordid detail -- why your marriage broke up. Telling the kids about mistakes you made actually helps them feel hopeful.
  
  
• Step up the supervision in adolescence. Speak up -- always respectfully, with explanation -- if you think your children's regular friends or romantic partners are unsuitable.

Illustration by: HEIDI YOUNGER for USA WEEKEND