SECOND CHANCES Men, Women and Children a...

SECOND CHANCES Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce by Judith S. Wallerstein with Sandra Blakeslee (Ticknor & Fields: $19.95; 329 pp.) When he first arrived at Judith Wallerstein’s Marin County Center for the Family in ransition shortly after his parents’ divorce, six-year-old John wouldn’t say a word, preferring to gather baby dolls in the center’s play-room. Setting the dolls firmly on their feet, he placed miniature tables, chairs and beds on their heads. On the steep roof of a nearby dollhouse, he then put mother and father dolls in precarious positions, gently catching each one as it began sliding off the roof. “Are the babies the strongest?” Wallerstein asked. “Yes,” John shouted excitedly. “The babies are holding up the world.”

It’s easy to underestimate the burdens lying on children’s slender shoulders after their parents’ divorce, for years often pass before any sign of emotional trauma appears in the form of anger, promiscuity, depression or fears of abandonment and betrayal. Children have difficulty discussing divorce, Wallerstein suggests in this provocative book, based on a 15-year study of 60 families, because it so deeply threatens their sense of identity. Children 5-8 tend to feel personally rejected by divorce, Wallerstein contends, for they are unable to conceive of a larger social world in which decisions are made independently of them. Children between 9 and 12, on the other hand, are beginning to widen their social circle, envisioning the family not as a world of its own but as a stage on which they perform for the world. And so, while divorce tends to trigger feelings of inadequacy among younger children, older children are more likely to feel anger, for their parents have removed their stage, the foundation for their sense of self.

In proposing solutions to these and related problems, Wallerstein avoids doling out the painfully obvious advice that makes so many self-help books seem condescending. While not faulting the institution of divorce, “a useful and necessary social remedy,” she suggests that parents’ understandable urge to spare the details from their children is misguided. “Children have a right to understand why the divorce is happening (for they) cannot mobilize their energies to cope with a crisis that they do not comprehend.”

Early reviews have criticized Wallerstein for failing to follow children from happily married families to see if they too suffer from the feelings of alienation, apathy and loneliness she attributes to divorce. This criticism is in part valid, for her subjects often are not as atypical as she makes them out to be; one-fourth of the children in her study, for example, become sexually active in junior high school, not an unusually high figure for the general population. Wallerstein’s decision to limit her study to 60 families she could get to know well imbues this book with a level of intuitive sophistication, however, that would have been impossible to achieve had she taken on a more weighty and impersonal study based on telephone or mail surveys.