The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce - Part 2
A 25 Year Landmark Study
 
by Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee
 
www.AmericanValues.org
 
Dr. Wallerstein's study, based on extensive one-on-one interviews at five-year intervals, produced numerous other important findings, including:
 
Adult children of divorce lack a healthy ``Couple Template," or model of marital partnership. They carry the template of the relationship between their parents into adulthood and use it to seek the image of their new family. The absence of a good image negatively influences their search for love, intimacy, and commitment. Anxiety leads many young adults into making bad choices in relationships, giving up hastily when problems arise, or avoiding relationships altogether. Ominously, they also say that they will not support their parents, especially their fathers, in old age.
 
By contrast, children from intact marriages generally took strength and encouragement from their parents' decision to stay together, even though many of the marriages that stayed together were strikingly similar in levels of conflict and unhappiness to those that ended in divorce. The adults who grew up in intact families told Dr. Wallerstein that their parents stayed together despite serious marital problems, and were able to cooperate on child-raising issues. They said that this cooperation helped protect them through their turbulent teens and provided a valuable role model in adulthood of how to behave - and how not to behave - in a marriage. One young man told her, ``I love my parents but I'm going to do things differently. My dad always walked away from arguments at home and it hurt their marriage. But I also learned from my folks that you take the good and the bad and that's what marriage is about."
 
On the other hand, children raised in highly dysfunctional marriages were no better off - and sometimes worse off - than children raised in unhappy post-divorce families. When chaos and abuse are the norm inside a family, the marital status of the parents can be irrelevant in affecting how much children get hurt.
 
Many positive experiences common to children of intact families were never cited by children of divorce. These include memories of play and family activities with themselves as children at the center; feeling that parents were available when needed - but in the background - at developmental turning points; awareness of parents' daily dialogues about children's behavior and needs. By comparison, the drama of divorce put parents at the center of their children's lives; often made parents unavailable in developmental crises; often obliged fathers and mothers to provide ``parallel parenting," including separate and sometimes contradictory child-rearing practices.
 
Adolescence lasts longer for children of divorce, because breaking free of their parents is more complicated than for their peers raised in intact families. Since many children become confidantes, friends, and even mentors of their parents during and after the divorce crisis, emotional separation is more difficult. Anger can also bind a child to a parent well into adulthood. Leaving home physically, therefore, does not equate with leaving home emotionally. The typical child of divorce is often remarkably compassionate and attuned to other people's feelings. She is unusually close to siblings and supportive of them. The need to cope at an early age can lead to mastery and later professional success. But at the extreme, the ``parentified" child still feels required to rescue mom or dad, feels guilty attending to her own needs, and may repeat the rescue fantasy in adult relationships.
 
To a striking extent, divorce is often a stumbling block to higher education. Among children of intact families, 90% had fathers who contributed to their college educations, versus less than 30% of children of divorce. In most states, a divorced father's financial and educational responsibilities end at age eighteen, even if the father is affluent and holds multiple degrees.
 
Divorced fathers were more likely to visit children when things were going well for them financially and personally, but the main concern of many remarried fathers was to please the new wife. Furthermore, stepmothers were extremely influential in shaping a father's relationship with children from previous marriages.
 
Having experienced divorce in childhood does not seem to prepare young adults for handling their own divorces differently. In fact, those who had children and got divorced behaved much like their parents. It was as if they were unable to translate their own pain and disappointment into strategies for protecting their children. Many were preoccupied with anger at the ex-partner and expected their children to accept the changes wrought by divorce without question. They explained very little to their children, although the adult children of divorce complained that their parents had done the same thing to them.
 
Drawing on these findings and others, Dr. Wallerstein questions many of our entrenched legal practices. For example, many older children and adolescents are bitter at having no say in planning their schedules as they grow up in post-divorce families, since the legal system is set up primarily to meet adult needs. Children are treated like rag dolls sitting in a dark corner of the courtroom. Compared with their friends in intact families, older children of divorce feel like second-class citizens who are denied the right to participate in the planning of their social activities, friendships, and vacations.

 

Young people from many divorced families are held to strict mediated agreements or court orders that chop their lives into awkward compartments. As a consequence, by age eighteen, many reject the parent who insisted on maintaining the rigid schedule. In Dr. Wallerstein's view, all of the professionals involved in the divorce process - judges, attorneys, and mental health professionals - need to reorient their thinking from concentrating narrowly on the breakup and on parental rights to helping parents prepare for the long haul, especially when the children enter adolescence and young adulthood.
 
Offering reasons for optimism as well as concern, Dr. Wallerstein's study shows that in their thirties, many of the children of divorce were able to resolve problems that had vexed them in their teenage years and early twenties. Some of the most troubled women, promiscuous and drug-addicted, stopped acting out. A number of men overcame their passivity and fear of failure to learn to love and value the women they chose as partners. Self-knowledge and detaching from the parental legacy of failure were key to the adult children's progress.

Nevertheless, to Dr. Wallerstein's astonishment, they continue to see themselves as children of divorce. In short, this is an identity that does not go away, at any age.

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