Grown Up and Messed Up: Following Up on Children of Divorce

In 1969, California Gov. Ronald Reagan signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, designed to allow adults to lead happier lives by making it easier for them to get out of unsatisfying marriages. And the American family has been going straight to hell ever since.

Or so a small chorus of voices reawakening the public debate on the relative benefits and evils of divorce would have you believe. The leader of the band is Judith Wallerstein, a senior lecturer at the School of Social Welfare at UC Berkeley and coauthor of “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce” (Hyperion).

Wallerstein and her research colleague, San Francisco State professor of psychology Julia M. Lewis, have been following 60 divorced families and their 131 children since 1971. Their new book, written with journalist Sandra Blakeslee, reports on how the children in this unusually long-term study are faring.

How are these California kids, now that they’re 28 to 43? Not so hot. They’re afraid to commit to relationships, feeling they’re doomed to fail at romance. They have little tolerance for conflict in their personal lives, believing that every argument represents the permanent slamming of a door. One-third of them don’t want to have children and say they’d never want a child to go through what they endured when young. They’re generally lonely, frightened and often angry at the fathers who failed to help them pay for college or at mothers who depended on them too much, obliterating their childhoods.

The unexpected upshot of divorce, according to Wallerstein, is that the greatest impact is felt when these children reach adulthood. “What we’d been telling parents for years was that divorce is difficult for children, but in time, they adjust,” she said in a telephone interview. “We didn’t know its effects would be so powerful for such a long time, that it would be a factor as young adults look for love.”

Perhaps Wallerstein was surprised by the persistence of the effects of divorce on children, but should the realization that adults uncoupling can leave deep scars have been so unanticipated? In a country where one-quarter of all children grow up with divorced parents, did conventional wisdom hold that divorce was good for them or, at best, no big deal?

In fact, it could be argued that one of the reasons Wallerstein’s work gets the attention it does is because her research confirms the deepest fears of parents who were raised by the last generation that believed marriage is forever. “If the results of Dr. Wallerstein’s study had been the opposite, and she found that these children did just fine after their parents divorced, I don’t think the book would be influencing public opinion the way it is,” said Frank Furstenberg, professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who has researched divided families. “Her conclusions reinforce societal attitudes.”

Elizabeth Taylor notwithstanding, most people don’t end their marriages capriciously, a circumstance that’s contributed to a stable divorce rate in this country for the last 25 years. Nearly half of all American marriages don’t last, but no one feels good about that. Guilt leads to denial, or to a search for answers.

There’s an old, politically incorrect joke about a man with a pronounced stutter. Walking his dog one morning, he bumps into his neighbor and tells him he’s just had a great interview for a job as a radio announcer.

“I th-th-th-think I have a r-r-r-r-eally g-g-g-good shot,” he says.

A few days later, the neighbor encounters the man again and asks if the job offer came through. “N-n-n-no,” the man replies. “That station d-d-d-doesn’t l-l-l-like J-J-J-J-Jews.”

In scientific terms, the man attributed a result to the wrong variable, a possibility whenever social scientists attempt to pinpoint cause and effect.

Gayla Margolin, a professor of psychology at USC who studies how marital conflict affects children, explains, “There is poor parenting and poor co-parenting in both divorced and two-parent families. If a child is having problems, how much can you truly attribute to the divorce? You have to try to untangle factors that are often associated with divorce from the event of the divorce itself.”

Wallerstein intended that her method, interviewing children and their parents in depth, then meeting to follow up every few years, would yield more accurate results than the sort of broad surveys in which people are contacted by telephone and given multiple-choice questions. Although her critics charge that asking children to interpret their own lives produces highly subjective results of questionable validity, her intimate knowledge of her research subjects makes her books compelling. “Second Chances” (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), an earlier look about the same Marin County families, was a bestseller.

Consider Racer, a 7-year-old baseball-loving boy whose mother was a child when Wallerstein’s study began. Now his parents are divorced. He spends weekends and one evening a week with his father in San Jose. The rest of the time, except for six weeks in the summer, he’s with his mother in Berkeley. Although he plays ball on a winning team, his parents have trouble getting him to practices and games.

Racer told Wallerstein, “Our team’s going to be in the championships, and the coach told me I could pitch in the playoffs. But only if I’m there for the rest of the season. Going back and forth bugs me. Like me and my friends are playing, and then it’s time to leave right when we’re into a game. I like seeing both my parents, but when I’m at my dad’s, I miss my mom, and when I’m at Mom’s, I want to see Dad. Every night I miss someone.” Only the most dispassionate interviewer wouldn’t be moved by Racer’s plight.

Wallerstein, a 78-year-old grandmother who raised three children and has been married 55 years, has heard a catalog of woes from broken families. She’s sympathetic to the problems of divorced adults, who are torn by their search for a new partner, economic concerns and the needs of their children. Their struggle seems even more poignant, punctuated as it is by shock: Most adults underestimate how hard life after divorce will be, she’s discovered. Nevertheless, Wallerstein’s work has made her a passionate child advocate.

“She’s a real proselytizer for the benefits of marriage and marital stability,” University of Pennsylvania’s Furstenberg said. “That can result in raising the level of guilt for Americans, who have had a long history of expecting that marriages be gratifying and rewarding.”

The bulk of the criticism lobbed at Wallerstein maintains that her study’s importance is undermined by the narrowness of her sample: She didn’t talk to enough people, and the ones she did consult were white, middle or upper-middle class, and from one California community. Wallerstein’s defense is she was deliberately looking at divorce under the best of circumstances. She said, “These are well-educated people who are attorneys and business executives and nurses. All the children in the study were developmentally on target. That’s why the findings are so startling. If these people had the difficulties they did, what can we expect happens to people with less obvious advantages?”

Experts quibble with Wallerstein’s methodology, but don’t substantially fault her conclusions. “The vast majority of social scientists agree that the effects of divorce on children are, on average, negative,” Furstenberg said. “But they are modest. The problem is her results are highly exaggerated. The stereotype that Wallerstein’s work conjures up is that most children who come out of a divorced family suffer permanent, lifelong damage. Most children of divorce aren’t distinguishable from the children of happily married couples.”

Paul Amato, professor of sociology at Pennsylvania State University and coauthor of “A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval” (Harvard University Press, 1997), agrees that Wallerstein’s position might be alarmist but acknowledges its value. “She’s trying to wave a red flag and say we’ve gone too far with this divorce business,” he said. “I’ve become convinced, through my research, that we can’t automatically assume that divorce won’t harm children. And I’m in agreement with her that most of the important effects of divorce don’t manifest themselves until adulthood. But she does emphasize the negative. Divorce increases the likelihood that children will have problems, but she makes it sound like most children of divorce are doomed.”

Given the evidence, parents who want the best for their children might be tempted to resurrect the old “stay together for the sake of the kids” model of marital misery. Wallerstein stops just short of encouraging them to do that. “I’m not against divorce,” she said. “But I am in favor of people being realistic enough to really provide a lot more help to their children.”

She emphasizes several important ways parents could make a breakup less damaging. First, clearly explain what’s happening to the family and why. “It should be among the most important conversations parents will ever have with their children, and you want them to learn from your experience. If you don’t know what to say, get advice from a professional.”

Second, when children are older (like Racer, the baseball player), pay attention to how their lives are affected by custody arrangements, and consider modifying them. “Children shouldn’t feel they’re a piece of luggage.” Keep the family’s focus on the children, even if the family doesn’t live together. Don’t perpetuate the adult war.

If parents who would rather not be married can remain good parents for a few years, she suggests waiting to divorce until children are at least 8.

“Every week, my dad introduces me to another significant other,” a 10-year-old boy told Wallerstein. Each time a parent ends a relationship with an adult their child has grown attached to, the experience can be painful. These multiple losses can be minimized by not introducing a child to a parent’s new lovers, unless there’s a serious expectation that they’ll be permanent or really significant.

Time does seem to heal wounds for many of Wallerstein’s subjects. In their 30s and 40s, the majority overcame the worst of their problems, she acknowledges. That doesn’t make them substantially different from the rest of the population, who, with a little effort and some good therapy, also succeed in leaving childhood issues behind.

Amato takes a historical view. “Think about kids who grew up during the Depression or during times of war,” he said. “Kids have always faced hard times. They still grow up and do well. We don’t want to make it sound like divorce is the end of the world for children.”