To what extent do studies and findings about marriage and divorce lose relevancy as people find myriad other ways to live together and create nontraditional families? Is the paradigm of marriage and divorce a logical one to explore at this point?

You know, that is a very interesting question, but paradoxically, most of these adults who grew up in divorced families wanted a long-lasting, faithful marriage. A few said, "If you marry, you divorce," and they were going to avoid marriage, but most wanted a lasting relationship with one person. So, in our heads, we still seem to be dealing with a paradigm that seems, I grant you, shaky.

I don't know which way the family is going, but it's not as if people standing at the threshold of adulthood are saying anything different than what they've always said. I think what is striking is that there appears to be a discrepancy between the wishes of young adults and the culture in which we live. We have a sense that we are living in a world that is always changing and that we really don't know what tomorrow's going to be like, but nonetheless, in the hearts and minds of these people, they wanted what they thought their parents failed at, and what they thought was very hard, maybe impossible, to get.

To what extent is the impact of divorce the same as the impact of growing up with parents in a lousy relationship?

I really try to answer that in some detail in my book. The worst family in my book is an intact family where the people are in constant conflict. They are very respected people in the community outside, but every night they fight and it soon escalates either into hitting each other or sex or hitting one of the children. The evening always ends on this macabre note. It is a family in which the children are totally marginalized and victimized. I have seen that in divorced families and I've seen it in intact families. So if we are talking about dreadful parenting, it has its full share in both.

The effects are the worst where the child has no parenting. There can be some advantage to a youngster coming out of a violent family if one parent is able to show an example of somebody who does something about their life in a constructive way. That is a very important model for the kids; that's much better than staying in a destructive marriage. You have to have one parent who gives priority to the children, and that's not always true -- in intact or divorcing families.

Is it only children of divorce who live in what you describe as "parallel universes"? How about children who are abused? Children who have lost a parent? Children who are adopted? Children with gay parents? Children of teenage parents? Children of alcohol-addicted or drug-addicted parents?

Children who are in any important category of their lives different -- whether it's because they are disadvantaged or superadvantaged and brought up with nannies and maids -- feel they live in a parallel universe. What is important is that we didn't think that children of divorce lived in parallel universes. I'm just adding to the list a group of children whom we didn't think belonged there. This came as a surprise to me too. We really thought, and I contributed to this assumption -- the book is a "mea also culpa" -- that there would be no continuing sense of "I'm a child of divorce." It turns out there is.

How much could we have known or assumed about the impact of divorce on children at the time that laws were made to make divorce easier? That period, especially in California in 1970, when the state established no-fault divorce, is one that you cite as a turning point.

I think there was so much euphoria, at least in California. Governor Reagan signed the bill with a flourish, backed by several task forces that were broadly representative of the right, the left, the church, secular groups. There was a sense that "we are breaking out of the shackles of hypocrisy. We no longer have to rely on proving adultery." There was a sense that if one person wants out, it can't be much of a marriage, and that the children would flourish because parents would be living without hypocrisy, and they would undo the mistake of the first marriage in a good second marriage. It was a period of unrealistic euphoria.

They were not, at that time, even concerned with what would happen with the children financially, much less emotionally. The bill became a law in 1970 and there was a bestseller at the time called "Creative Divorce." I think the fantasy was: "I am going to get those years back and I'm going to start from the beginning." It's a very touching fantasy that did not really consider any of the detrimental effects.

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