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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Judith Wallerstein makes a case for marriage, and on rare occasions, a healthy divorce.
Oct 4, 2000 | For a therapist who has focused on the depressing -- and frequently alarming -- fallout of divorce for the past 30 years, Judith Wallerstein is remarkably optimistic. Even an extensive book tour, promoting "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study," has not dampened the high spirits of this 78-year-old expert on marital failure. If nothing else, the three decades Wallerstein has spent documenting the impact of divorce on children have caused her to become more urgent, more biting and less forgiving about the way adults in this country -- at home, in the courts, in counseling -- treat children in the midst and aftermath of divorce. She is enthusiastic, and specific, about changes that can and should happen to help kids with battling parents have healthier lives as adults.
Talking from the home she shares with her husband of 53 years, Wallerstein says she is aware of how difficult it is for the world to accept her conclusion that divorce is worse for kids than anyone imagined. But, she warns, the impulse to believe that children are resilient, that they "get over" the difficulties of divorce, that they are better off when bickering parents split up, is selfish of parents and disrespectful of children. The era in which Americans decided to make divorces easier to obtain was one of "unrealistic euphoria," says Wallerstein, and we are all, though we are reluctant to accept it, suffering from the consequences.
Jennifer Foote Sweeney, editor of Mothers Who Think, interviewed Wallerstein for Salon.com.
This is a very complicated effort covering three decades and 131 children, along with, more recently, a comparison group of children from "intact families." How can the various kinds of fallout from dysfunction, and the origins of dysfunction, be interpreted accurately?
I am drawing some general recommendations. I am saying that there is all too little consideration of the importance of maintaining the integrity of the child's friendships and playtime. I am saying that the courts and a lot of mental health people and a lot of parents give priority to the parents dividing up the child. That is terrible; that is man-made and woman-made chaos. There are certain things that we can do blithely without recognizing the impact on children. We need to undo them.
In reasonably good, intact families, for instance, parents go out of their way to think in terms of what kind of vacation a child might like to have. They don't think in terms of who gets July and who gets August. It's ridiculous and it is unfair. And what I'm reporting is that these children feel that their lives have been cut into to please their parents and that they've paid for their parents' divorce -- and that is undoable. That is absolutely undoable.
But can you let children define, even help decide, how the divorce is going to work? Isn't there a prevailing idea that by giving children that kind of power you make them feel insecure?
I'm not saying that children should rule the roost; I'm just saying that children shouldn't feel like a piece of baggage. I'm arguing for such minimal things -- that court orders should recognize that, each year, each child is a year older.
I have a hunch that someday we'll look back on what we do now as the Middle Ages. The notion that court orders should stand regardless of how the child grows -- it's like taking a child's shoe size when they are 6 and using it for years after, regardless of the pain it causes the child.
