Dr. Bad News

After conducting a massive 25-year study, Judith Wallerstein concludes that children of divorce are hit hardest after they grow up.

By Cathy Young

Oct 3, 2000 | Judith Wallerstein's 1989 book, "Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce," made headlines and sparked controversy with its claim that the effects of divorce on children were more harmful than was generally supposed at the time. Most conservatives saw this pronouncement as a long-overdue rediscovery of old-fashioned common sense; many feminists, as an attempt to revive traditional norms especially oppressive to women. (Wallerstein rated a dishonorable mention in Susan Faludi's 1991 tome, "Backlash.") For better or worse, "Second Chances" most likely helped nudge the cultural climate toward a more judgmental view of divorce, at least where young children were involved.

The newest book from the 78-year-old family therapist, coauthored by Julia Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee, is unlikely to calm any nerves. "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study" delivers the bad news that the wounds of divorce are not healed by time: Indeed, Wallerstein writes, "it's in adulthood that children of divorce suffer the most."

This assertion may well produce a wave of bone-chilling dread in millions of Americans already wrestling with guilt about divorce. But should it? That depends on how much credibility Wallerstein's findings are due. Some of the problems chronicled in the book are undoubtedly real and serious. But Wallerstein's conclusions are often based on a less-than-rigorous brand of scholarship that a lot of her conservative fans would, under other circumstances, probably dismiss as "junk science."

Wallerstein reports that divorce has a terrible impact on the ability of its young victims to form romantic relationships and build their own families. Children from broken homes grow up, she says, without an "internal template" of a successful partnership. "No matter how often they see their parents, the image of them together as a loving couple is forever lost ... As children grow up and choose partners of their own, they lack this central image of the intact marriage." Wallerstein notes that in her study, children of divorce, unlike their peers from intact marriages, hardly ever talked about their parents' interaction, before or after the separation.

When a parent dies, a child suffers loss. With divorce, says Wallerstein, a child must cope not only with loss but with failure: "Even if the young person decides as an adult that the divorce was necessary, that in fact the parents had little in common to begin with," she writes, "the divorce still represents failure -- failure to keep the man or the woman, failure to maintain the relationship, failure to be faithful, or failure to stick around. This failure in turn shapes the child's inner template of self and family. If they failed, I can fail, too."

As a result, some of the children of divorce whose lives Wallerstein has followed (their average age at the latest interviews was 33) have grown up to be pathological commitment-phobes, expecting all relationships to end in disaster and pain. Others, going to the opposite extreme, have rushed into reckless, spur-of-the-moment, almost invariably doomed marriages in their late teens or early 20s, or selected clearly inadequate partners who are too weak and needy to leave. Even those who are happily married remain haunted by fear of abandonment and have trouble dealing with any disagreement or conflict.

By contrast, reports Wallerstein, the young people in her comparison sample -- raised in "reasonably good or even moderately unhappy intact families" -- had a much better idea of what they wanted in a spouse and of "the demands and sacrifices required in a close relationship." Once they had tied the knot, she says, "memories of how their parents struggled and overcame differences, how they cooperated in a crisis," provided both guidance and reassurance in dealing with inevitable marital stresses and problems.

These tidy, and disheartening, conclusions beg a familiar question. What about children of never-divorced parents whose image of marriage is more Jerry Springer than Norman Rockwell? How do they fare?

Wallerstein does emphasize that if there is violence or intense open conflict in a relationship, staying together doesn't do the kids any good. However, she believes that an unhappy but bearable marriage in which both parents resign themselves to lack of marital fulfillment and "patch their relationship enough so that good parenting is maintained" is better for the children than even an amicable divorce.

Next Page: It's a great story, but is it good social science?

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