Remarriage seems to be interchangeable with divorce in many of your conclusions. I couldn't always tell if remarriage improved or worsened the effects of divorce. Do children ever trade the template of a bad marriage and divorce with a good one demonstrated in remarriage?

I tried to portray several really good stepparents in situations where the kid wasn't ready for them -- and the opposite situation, where a youngster really wanted a good relationship and the stepparent wasn't willing to put in the effort. It is true that if you look at national statistics, children from divorced families and children from remarried families have similar difficulties academically and similar difficulties in their whole psychological adjustment; they are much more frequently referred by teachers for counseling than children from intact families.

But what I found is that where there were really good remarriages on both sides -- this is the tricky thing -- those kids did much better. The trouble is that I had less than 10 percent [of cases] where remarriages lasted and where both the mother and the father had good remarriages. Two good remarriages -- that's a blessing -- or if there are grandparents in a stable marriage.

So the example of a strong marriage in the immediate family also had a positive impact?

Of course. Most of them didn't have that, but those who did were way ahead of the game when they came into their adulthood.

After all you've seen, do you believe that children can be prepared adequately for divorce?

I don't know what "adequately" means, but it certainly can be done better than giving what I call the real estate explanation: "Your dad is going to live here and your mom's going to live here." All that does is emphasize the fact that life is totally unpredictable and that you're likely to lose what you've got.

It has to start by saying, "When your dad and I married, we loved each other." We don't want these children to feel that they were born out of anger, out of a marriage that never should have happened. We have to give them some sense of a good tradition. I was bowled over by the number of adults from the intact families who told me in detail of their parents' courtships. That just blew me away. I would have sworn they had been there.

By the same token, you feel that parents who are having a crisis in an intact family or splitting up should be honest about how difficult marriage can be, how it requires work -- sort of a realistic accounting of what marriage can involve.

That is profoundly important. Children need help and they often don't get any from parents. For instance, this going back and forth is not easy for a 4-year-old. Children don't generally go back and forth in their lives. Some children are able to negotiate it with ease, but for some children, it is a source of great anxiety -- especially since they learn very quickly, like little CIA agents, not to talk in Mommy's house about what happens in Daddy's house.

These are tasks we don't usually expect children to do and they need help, like a 10-year-old whom a parent may not see as needing much help. Well, a 10-year-old girl needs help being alone at her father's house. Many of these young girls worry about whether they will have their first menstrual period at their father's home and what would they do. Adults don't remember that. There are all these issues that these children deal with by themselves.

And if any one parent says, "My child isn't ready for this," it is interpreted as that parent not being friendly to the other parent. The friendly parent is a terrible preoccupation in the courts.

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