Should
You Stay Together for the Kids?
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What
drew someone from such a stable background to the study of
marital distress? At the end of the 1960s, Wallerstein, whose
Ph.D. is in clinical psychology, moved from Topeka, Kans.
to swinging California. "Divorce was almost unheard of in
the Midwest," she recalls. Not so on the West Coast: the state
had just passed its pioneering no-fault divorce law. Wallerstein
took a job consulting at a large community mental-health center
in Marin County just as the social dam began to crack. "We
started to get complaints," she says, "from nursery school
teachers and parents: ŒOur children are having a very hard
time. What should we do?'"
The
prevailing view at the time, she says, was that divorce was
no big deal for kids. So much for the power of positive thinking.
"We began to get all these questions," Wallerstein remembers.
"The children were sleepless. The children in the nursery
school were aggressive. They were out of control." When Wallerstein
hit the library for answers, she discovered there were none.
The research hardly existed, so she decided to do her own.
She had a hunch about what she would learn. "I saw a lot of
children very upset," she says, "but I fully expected that
it would be fleeting."
Her
hunch was wrong. Paradise for kids from ruptured families
wasn't easily regained. Once cast out of the domestic garden,
kids dreamed of getting back in. The result more often than
not was frustration and anxiety. Children of divorce suffer
depression, learning difficulties and other psychological
problems more frequently than those of intact families. Some
of Wallerstein's colleagues, not to mention countless divorced
parents, felt they were being guilt-tripped by a traditionalist.
They didn't want to hear this somber news.
Now,
decades later, some still don't want to hear her. For parents,
her book's chief finding, to be sure, is hardly upbeat or
very reassuring: children take a long time to get over divorce.
Indeed, its most harmful and profound effects tend to show
up as the children reach maturity and struggle to form their
own adult relationships. They're gun-shy. The slightest conflict
sends them running. Expecting disaster, they create disaster.
"They look for love in strange places," Wallerstein says.
"They make terrible errors of judgment in whom they choose."
Leanne
Port, 43, a Sydney mother and student whose parents separated
when she was 12, says she has little memory of the trauma.
But as a young woman, she couldn't seem to stick with the
same boyfriend. "My father was a party boy and I took after
him," she says: "I learned to pick guys up and dump them as
easily as men could [with women]." She's since acquired a
taste for commitment. Married now for 11 years, her feelings
about divorce are unequivocal: "I see my marriage as together,
forever. I would never leave my husband."
Ella
Asher, 17, is also prepared to play the field-until the right
man comes along. A Sydney high school student, she was nine
when her father left. Asher admits to having a "phobia of
commitment because I don't want to end up like my parents."
But she's "determined to get married when I meet the right
guy and make it work. I wouldn't consider divorce as an option."
And
therein lies another problem, according to Wallerstein: the
belief, quite common in children of divorce, that marriage
is either a fairy tale or nothing. These jittery, idealistic
children tend to hold out for the perfect mate-only to find
they have a very long wait. Worse, once they're convinced
they've found him, they're often let down. High romantic expectations
tend to give way, Wallerstein reports, to bitter disillusionments.
Children from broken families tend to marry later, yet divorce
more often than those from intact homes.>>MORE
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November 6, 2000
| NO. 44
SOCIETY
AND SCIENCE
COVER
: Is Divorce Bad for Kids?
A controversial book argues that the damage caused when parents split
is graver than suspected. Should unhappy adults stay together for their
kids' sake?
Viewpoint:
Katha Pollitt on divorce's bum rap
SOUTH
PACIFIC
AUSTRALIA:
Trials of the Regiment
The armed forces have fine policies on violence and sexual equity, but
have they the will to implement those rules?
T
H E A R T S
FESTIVALS:
The Pacific is rediscovered in New Caledonia
CINEMA:
Omar Epps hopes Love & Basketball is a slam dunk
BOOKS: Steve
Martin gets serious in his novella Shopgirl
Margaret Atwood's
sinuous tapestry of family secrets
A Ugandan novelist's
haunting look at his homeland
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
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