The "Negative" Legacy of Divorce

2=1 has reviewed a valuable resource which documents the effects of divorce on American families.  The author, Judith Wallerstein has found that young Americans who grew up in divorced or remarried families have run into an unexpected set of difficulties in adulthood as they form their own intimate relationships, start families or remain childless and, in too many cases, struggle through their own divorces (The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study Hyperion 2000).

Dr. Wallerstein revealed the results of the first and only study of the effects of divorce that closely followed 93 children of divorce over a quarter century.  Comparing those young women and men with a similar group from intact families, she made a startling finding:  the effects of divorce are cumulative and crescendo in adulthood.  In fact, the greatest impact of divorce does not occur until people are in their twenties and thirties.

At a time when one in four adults is a child of divorce, Dr. Wallerstein’s study represents an enormously powerful phenomenon that is revolutionizing our concept of the family and reshaping our society.

“The delayed impact of divorce in adulthood is a revolutionary finding and a stunning surprise,” according to Dr. Wallerstein, who has written her book with Sandra Blakeslee, an award-winning science correspondent for The New York Times, and Julia M. Lewis, a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University .  “We thought that children would be able to work through issues related to divorce by the time they reached late adolescence or left home  We advised parents that if they refrained from fighting and arranged their schedules so that the children could see both of them often, then the children would do well.  But these policies were based on adult needs and perceptions of divorce.  We failed to realize that living in a post-divorce family is an entirely difference experience for children as opposed to adults.  The story of divorce is far more complex and the impact more far-reaching than we had imagined.”

Negative Behaviors and Expectations Created by Divorce

Moreover, Dr. Wallerstein discovered that growing up in a divorced family creates a consistent pattern of behaviors and expectations in young people when they set out to form their own adult relationships.  Otherwise well-functioning adult children of divorce, now in their late twenties to early forties, must fight to overcome:

Expectations of failure, based on an “internalized image of failure.”

Fear of loss, due to earlier anxiety about abandonment by one or both parents;

Fear of change, since experience has shown them it is usually for the worse;

Fear of conflict, because it leads to explosions or the impulse to escape;

Fear of betrayal, because they have seen so much of it;

Fear of loneliness, sometimes leading to self-destructive choices in partners.

Disturbing Facts of the Impact of Divorce on Children

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 a model of marital partnership.  By contrast, children from intact marriages generally took strength and encouragement from their parent’s 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.  Many positive experiences common to children of intact families were never cited by children of divorce.  Adolescence lasts longer for children of divorce, because breaking free of their parents is more complicated than for their peers raised in intact families.  To a striking extent, divorce is often a stumbling block to higher education.

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.  Having experienced divorce in childhood does not seem to prepare young adults for handling their own divorces differently.  Thirty years ago, when the divorce rate started rising to epidemic proportions in America , parents everywhere asked an agonizing question: 

What will happen to our children in the long run?  With the release of the findings of Dr. Judith Wallerstein’s unprecedented 25 year study, the answers are now in.

Judith S. Wallerstein, Ph.D., is widely considered the world’s foremost authority on the effects of divorce on children.  She is the founder of the Judith Wallerstein Center of the Family in Transition, located in Marin County, Calif.   She is the author, along with Sandra Blakeslee, of the national bestsellers The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, and Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade after Divorce.  With Dr. John Berlin Kelly, she wrote Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope with Divorce.

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