Divorce: Not So Bad For Kids?

January 14, 2002 5:16 PM

Divorce: Not So Bad For Kids? this report, detailed by USA Today says "After studying almost 1,400 families and more than 2,500 children. — some of them for three decades — trailblazing researcher E. Mavis Hetherington. finds that about 75% to 80% of children from divorced homes are 'coping reasonably well and functioning in the normal range.' Eventually they are able to adapt to their new lives." Of course, many of us with single parents could have probably told you this a long time ago but here are numbers, controversial to the "pro-family" establishment of course.
posted by owillis (17 comments total)

So people can recover from bad things. What's the big news in that? I would caution that this report shouldn't be used to condone casual divorce. Divorce is, "usually brutally painful", despite the long-term consequences.
posted by matt324 at 5:30 PM on January 14, 2002

I think these numbers are more telling (from the same article):

"• 25% of children from divorced families have serious social, emotional or psychological problems; 10% from intact families do."
posted by mr_crash_davis at 5:36 PM on January 14, 2002

I followed the link and read the following:

"divorce doubles the risk that 20 years later adult children would experience serious social, emotional and/or psychological dysfunction."

Also, while you portray the positive side (75% of children emerge unscathed), I deduce that therefore up to 25% of children from divorced homes will NOT cope reasonably well in life. It sounds to me that divorce is basically playing russian roulette with your child's mental health. No, wait: russian roulette has better odds.

Before anyone takes it personally, let me say that my wife is divorced. If it were not for divorce, I would not have the lovely family I have.

My point is nothing more than this: there is no useful purpose in portraying divorce as inherently positive. It sometimes has accidental (i.e., peripheral as in Aristotle's sense of 'accidens') consequences that are sometimes good, but divorce is not inherently good, or harmless.

The "pro-family" people are not out to get you or condemn you.
posted by jtm at 5:42 PM on January 14, 2002

Oscar Wilde: Marriage is made on earth. Divorce is made in heaven. But the, Oscar was gay.
posted by Postroad at 6:02 PM on January 14, 2002

My point is this: I'm certainly not pro-divorce, but myself and my mom (who raised me) have been hearing for years from groups (mostly conservative) who present the thought that if you are the product of divorce - well you are hopelessly damaged and for the rest of your life will wander aimlessly in the streets searching for mommy and daddy (dramatic license) when in reality - of course it sucks and should be avoided at all costs, but people who are products of divorce can be "crazy like the rest of us".

I'll be the first to say the biggest familial problem nowadays are people not ready to be married doing so, and adding kids to the mix instead of waiting or not getting married anyhow. But it can be just as bad if people stay together "for the children" when they loathe each other.
posted by owillis at 6:04 PM on January 14, 2002

"• 25% of children from divorced families have serious social, emotional or psychological problems; 10% from intact families do."

Could this be because the divorced parties were already more unstable and passed that on to their kids? Just a theory, I could have gotten it either way
posted by allpaws at 6:14 PM on January 14, 2002

And i would think that non-amicable divorces are more of a strain on the children, than one where there is no agro involved, which the article says nothing about.
posted by Zool at 6:22 PM on January 14, 2002

Coming from a divorced household myself (along with my half-brother), I think that it has to do more with the behavior of the parents doing the divorcing than the act of divorce itself.

Plenty of kids that I grew up with suffered unnecessarily because the parents were incapable of making the marital problems their own, instead of using the kids as pawns, or messengers, or just making them complicit in their hatred of the other parent by telling them how awful they were. That would make any kid miserable....

My brother and I both suffered when our parents divorced, but I don't think that whatever problems we had later were a result of the divorce(s). Our parents responsibly explained their problems, made clear that we were not at fault, and remained not only civil, but friendly with one another.
posted by readymade at 6:25 PM on January 14, 2002

myself and my mom (who raised me) have been hearing for years from groups (mostly conservative) who present the thought that if you are the product of divorce - well you are hopelessly damaged and for the rest of your life will wander aimlessly in the streets searching for mommy and daddy (dramatic license) when in reality - of course it sucks and should be avoided at all costs, but people who are products of divorce can be "crazy like the rest of us".

I know this is supposed to be an exaggeration to make a point - but I've never heard anything remotely similiar to this.

The study concludes that divorce statistically doubles the children's likelyhood of having some pretty severe social problems later in life. I'd say those are pretty shitty odds.

And if I may pipe in here as devil's advocate and disgustingly happy married man: Marriage is not an acknowledgment that you've found the perfect person; it's a public promise to make things work with someone. No one should stay together and loathe each other for the kids. But they should try damn hard to stay married, and to find a way to love each other for the kids.
posted by glenwood at 6:44 PM on January 14, 2002

Luckily, the phrase, "...reasonably well and functioning in the normal range,' means nothing. Makes manipulating the research much, much easier when you get to lead it to a conclusion with no scientific basis.
posted by kristin at 8:11 PM on January 14, 2002

Bah, builds character.
posted by rushmc at 9:10 PM on January 14, 2002

When I was a teenager, I always envied the kids I knew whose parents were divorced--it seemed to me that they had much more freedom than I did, and were much happier.
I think the point is, that for years we have had relentless propaganda about how horrible divorce is for the kids, even when there is no real evidence that this is so.
The tone of the present article was telling--it couldn't just report the results of the study, but had to weigh it down with over-the-top moralizing about how divorce was horrible for children despite what the survey said.
I think sociological studies of this sort are dubious to begin with--there is too much human variety that is not accounted for.
But the real story here is the same old one: if a study claims to support right-wing 'family values', then it is trumpeted as The Truth. If a study doesn't provide such support, then it is recounted grudgingly and with skepticism.
posted by Rebis at 11:53 PM on January 14, 2002

As a well-adjusted, completely normal, not-screwed-up kid of divorced parents, I can say this: readymade is right, it's not divorce per se that's the problem, it's the way parents divorce. Urging parents who hate each other to stay together is dumb. Educating parents about particular, preventable ways in which divorce can hurt their kids, and showing parents how to do it right has always made more sense to me.

I think all parents getting a divorce should be forced to look at these statistics, and be told in no uncertain terms to behave well and with their kids' best interests at heart. Then we'll see how many kids get screwed up because of divorce.

(As an aside -- these stats are completely meaningless because they don't tell you what would've happened to these kids if their (unhappy) parents hadn't divorced. I'd be curious to see how kids of divorced parents fare vs. kids of parents who contemplated divorce and then changed their mind).
posted by josh at 1:20 AM on January 15, 2002

When I was seven, parents told me they were getting divorced. My reply, "...it's about time."

Nothing better than Christmas with 2 parents trying to erase their guilt!
posted by Mick at 6:10 AM on January 15, 2002

Im 35 and my parents divorced when I was 5.. both parents remarried. This past Christmas my fathers wife died and he spent Christmas with my mother and her husband. The point is, family is wealth and the more family you have the richer you are. We are tribal creatures sometimes divorce is a way of creating a bigger tribe.
posted by stbalbach at 7:51 AM on January 15, 2002

My parents divorced when I was 14 (my sister was 11). There was definitely a plaintiff in the divorce and I still haven't really forgiven him [um, or her]. Maybe that's irrational.

My parents cultivated this notion of parental infallibility, which was shattered in the aftermath. This might show up in conflicts regarding my inlaws, who can make peremptory demands of her (and back it up by being her parents), but towards me, they're just fellow adults (sometimes) trying to assert authority they don't have.

I've been married almost four years now, in a great relationship. I'm confident now that this will last, and we'll always be ready to put in the work needed to maintain the marriage, but there's still this lingering theme of overcoming my past, as if by celebrating our 50th anniversary in 2048 I can prove that divorce is not hereditary.

I think I've adapted OK, but I do have some absolutist viewpoints. Divorce sucks. "Divorce Court" type shows are callous and evil. Tabloid musings about celebrity marital problems are the lowest of all tab stories, and the voyeurs that read them even worse.

At our wedding were the added conundrums of where to seat the divorced parents who would prefer not to see each other. I tried to keep things smooth, but still heard 3rd-hand how each parent was miffed about a different part of the weekend. Well tough shit, you're the ones who got divorced. We tried our best.

P. S. columnist/cartoonist Ted Rall ("Revenge of the Latchkey Kids"), for one, has rather conspicuously not gotten over his parents' divorce.
posted by kurumi at 9:48 AM on January 15, 2002

Of course it's easy to say that most children whose parents are divorced manage to deal with it. Most people manage to deal with a lot of things: death, disease, etc. without losing it, because people are pretty resilient, or we wouldn't last long.

That's still not saying it's a good thing, especially if one of your parents goes out with/marries someone who is a real jerk. Which somehow seems to be a pattern. At least it was with me. Stuff like that can be worse than the divorce itself.

And if you have shared custody, suddenly you feel terribly uprooted, because you have NO ONE PLACE that's really yours. No one place you live, it's terribly schizophrenic.

Then again, I have friends I look at and go "Their parents should be divorced." OK, only one really, and that's because the father is abusive. But they're Catholic.
posted by dagnyscott at 7:58 AM on January 16, 2002