Relatively few politicians seem to care about how children grow up in this country when it comes to cuts in Medicaid or welfare spending. Utter a word about divorce or single-parent families, and the concern grows a little bit stronger.
We are on the edge of a rapidly developing anti-divorce movement in the American political agenda. Already, in a half-dozen states, legislators have proposed to restrict divorce on the grounds that it may cause teen suicide and an inability to "form lasting attachments."
According to Time, at least 37 percent of American children live with divorced parents. News flash to aforementioned statesmen: divorce has not exactly reduced this sizable chunk of America's youth to emotional cripples or prospective suicides.
In fact, the alleged psyche-scarring effects of divorce have been tremendously overrated. Politicians love to cite the "studies" of California therapist Judith Wallerstein. She found that 41 percent of the children of divorced couples are "doing poorly-worried, underachieving, deprecating and often angry" years after their parents' divorce.
But Wallerstein based her findings on only 60 couples, all of whom were self-selected seekers of family therapy to begin with-that's how she encountered them. In addition, there was no control group of, say, couples in therapy who stayed together.
More to the point, the qualities singled out in these children-underachieving, often angry-are hardly traits uniquely endemic to the children of divorcees. But because of the stigma that divorce often carries, psychological problems that may be particular to the child are frequently and speciously linked to the divorce.
Furthermore, divorce is already stigmatized in harmful ways. Teachers consistently interpret children's behavior more negatively when they are told that the children are from "broken" homes. And we all know the effect teachers' expectations have on children's performances. If legislators want to assist the children of divorce, the idea should be to de-stigmatize divorce among teachers, children, and parents.
Instead, the current anti-divorce rhetoric slanders millions of happy and capable young people. Studies that attempt to distinguish between the effects of divorce itself and those of the income decline that often accompanies the departure of one parent's salary have found no lasting psychological damage exclusively attributable to divorce.
This is not to say divorce is desirable. However, legislators must realize that divorce is sometimes a necessary act and not an outright sin. What mother wants her kids to grow up witnessing constant parental squabbling? What father wants to risk losing custody of his kids? What husband or wife wants to admit defeat and recognize that their presumed love of a lifetime has gone dry after two years?
These scenarios, not to mention things like adultery and domestic violence, have always been among the pitfalls of marriage. They are the reasons parents seek divorce despite the stigma they and their kids may carry. Just because the occasionally impristine grounds for divorce are taboo doesn't mean the legal escape route should be too.
Yet anti-divorce legislators want to repeal no-fault divorce laws and return to the system in which one parent has to prove the other guilty of adultery, addiction, or worse. But what does this really accomplish? The divorce rate was rising steadily long before the no-fault divorce was introduced in the late '60s and '70s.
Legislators could take a tip from sociologist Constance Ahrons. She suggests that just as there are bad marriages, there are "good divorces," in which both parents maintain their financial and emotional responsibilities toward their kids. Maybe if reformers focused on improving the quality of divorces-by requiring, for example, pre-nuptial agreements specifying how children will be cared for in the event of a split-the problems that supposedly result from divorces could be minimized.
Any sociologist could tell you the most destructive feature of divorce is the poverty that ensues when children are left with a low-earning mother. The way out is not to toughen the process through which one becomes a single mother, but to toughen child-support collection and fortify the safety net of supportive services for low-income families-including childcare, Medicaid, and welfare.
Too expensive? Too ideologically distasteful compared with denouncing divorce and, by extension, the divorced and their children? Perhaps. But sometimes grownups have to do difficult and costly things, whether they want to or not. For the sake of their children, that is.
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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