Discovering Life Can (and Does) Go on After Divorce

In the beginning, E. Mavis Hetherington was looking for as much pathology as the next person. It was the early 1970s, with the American family in free fall, and she fully expected that her just-launched study of the impact of divorce would find dysfunction and plenty of it: parents unable to cope, maladjusted children with long-term difficulties. By almost any measure, “we expected them to blow it.”

Yet here’s the surprising thing about her families, with all their couplings and uncouplings and even recouplings in the years that followed: The vast majority of parents rebounded from the pain and upheaval. Resiliency overshadowed pathology. By the time the children were young adults, considering marriage and families of their own, Hetherington discovered at least 75% coping fairly well--some very well--with life.

Divorce, it seems, is not predestined. Now Hetherington, 75, wants to get the word out. More than that, with the publication of “For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered” (Norton, $26.95), she wants to change the public debate about divorce. Her book offers reassurance to the millions of Americans who don’t make it till death does part them. More than 40% of marriages end in divorce, down from the record highs of the ‘80s but hardly a statistic for celebration. The most divisive aspect has centered on the harm inflicted on children--irreparable damage, some researchers contend.

Hetherington, a University of Virginia professor emeritus, believes she offers “a more hopeful look, a more realistic look” at the consequences. She says the book, authored with New York writer John Kelly, is neither antimarriage (though angry e-mails already are accusing her of such) nor pro-divorce. Rather, it explains the challenges people face and the diverse choices they make. It doesn’t ignore the downside. While most children adapt and adjust to their parents’ split, she says, 20% to 25% are left deeply scarred.

“I harbor no doubts about the ability of divorce to devastate,” she writes. “It can and does ruin lives.... But that said, I also think much current writing on divorce--both popular and academic--has exaggerated its negative effects and ignored its sometimes considerable positive effects.”

After three decades exploring the most important nexus of human relations, through the stability or dissolution of nearly 1,400 marriages, she wishes others weren’t so skeptical. “Why are people so afraid to say that in the long run, people end up living reasonably constructive lives?”

Partly a how-to survival primer, partly a behavioral science treatise, “For Better or for Worse” provides a window on the ways humans react when their worlds implode.

Some families were followed for almost 30 years. That longevity, as well as the work’s scope and methodology, makes Hetherington’s research the most comprehensive ever on divorce. Her lab holds thousands of her subjects’ interviews and questionnaires and tens of thousands of hours of videotape.

Not all the families were divorced when they signed up. Hetherington intentionally recruited a control group among the happily married. But control is a fleeting thing when love is concerned. Some of her married couples started to divorce, even as her divorced men and women started to remarry.

Relaxing in the converted schoolhouse outside Charlottesville where she lives with her husband, she laughs at the memory of her early frustrations: “When you study families over time, you’re studying a moving target.”

Sociologist Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University praises Hetherington’s approach as groundbreaking: “Everybody should be in her debt. She almost originated the rigorous scientific study of the effect of divorce on children. “The debate has swung back and forth between people saying divorce is bad for most any kid, and people saying divorce is not a problem,” Cherlin said. “Her message is that divorce raises the risk of undesirable things happening to your kids, but most kids are going to do OK.”

The first year after a divorce is brutally painful for adults and children alike, Hetherington says. Doctor visits double for men and triple for women, although generally women cope better in the long run, and many make changes that ultimately enhance their lives.

The second year after a divorce usually brings improvement and adjustment, but parents should remain vigilant. Some will have their hands more full than others: Boys rebel more against mothers than against fathers. Girls experience greater stress during adolescence. Daughters in divorce or melded stepfamilies more frequently become sexually precocious.

Not until the sixth year after a divorce are most family members emotionally and mentally back on their feet, according to Hetherington. Twenty years later, she lists caveats and silver linings: A significant number of grown children consider divorce an acceptable solution to an unhappy marriage, nearly twice as many as in intact families. The percentage of adult children of divorce with serious psychological problems remains double that of intact families. “That is significant risk, but it still means 75 to 80% are doing all right or very well,” she stresses.

California psychologist Judith Wallerstein, whose bleak readings of divorce’s aftershocks continually hit the bestseller lists, takes issue with Hetherington’s optimism. The offspring of broken marriages whom she studied were left anxious and pessimistic, especially crippled when it came to love. “They say, ‘It’s better not to feel, I learned that a long time ago.’”

Perhaps the two approaches should be examined side by side, suggests David Popenoe, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University and author of “Life Without Father.” “One can go either way in the analysis of this data, and that’s one thing that Hetherington’s book points out,” he says. “If you’re a child of divorce, you certainly don’t need to be told your life is a mess and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

As she embarks on a cross-country book tour, Hetherington already is drawing much attention. Detractors call her a marriage basher. “It’s people like you,” a recent e-mail vented, “who are eroding the sacred institution of marriage.”

The criticism pains and amuses her. The grandmother hardly looks incendiary. She’s been married 46 years to the same man, a retired University of Virginia law professor. Neither her parents nor her three sons have divorced.

She holds strong views about marriage: that couples bail out of troubled relationships far too quickly, that a family with two supportive parents is by far the best way to raise children. But take one away and disaster need not strike, she says: A caring, competent custodial parent is the “most potent protection” a child of divorce can have.