Divorce affects children most severely decades after their parents separate, when they reach their 20s and 30s and struggle to create their own families, a new study has found.
In a one-of-a-kind study that took 25 years to complete, sociologist and author Judith Wallerstein found children who grew up in divorced families found forming intimate and lasting relationships of their own more difficult than the adult children whose parents remained together.
Adult children of divorced parents were found to be less likely to marry, more likely to divorce, and more likely to have children out of wedlock and to use drugs, according to the study, which was based on in-depth interviews with 100 children in a Northern California community who were followed by researchers for 25 years. The project began in 1971, soon after California liberalized its divorce laws.
The adult children of divorce tend to expect their relationships to fail and they struggle with the fear of loss, conflict, betrayal and loneliness, the study concludes.
“The delayed impact of divorce in adulthood is a revolutionary finding and a stunning surprise,” writes Ms. Wallerstein, the 78-year-old senior lecturer emeritus of the University of California at Berkeley whose previous studies on divorce have gained her a large public following around the world.
“We failed to realize that living in a post-divorce family is an entirely different experience for children as opposed to adults. The story of divorce is far more complex and the impact more far-reaching than we had ever imagined,” she asserts.
In The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, published this week by Hyperion and co-authored with Julia Lewis, a professor of psychology at San Francisco State University, and Sandra Blakeslee, science writer for The New York Times, Ms. Wallerstein attacks the “trickle-down theory of divorce.” If divorce is better for an unhappy parent, it is not necessarily better for the children, she argues.
Of the adult children of divorce she followed over 25 years, 60% are married, compared to 80% of those in a comparison group whose parents’ marriage lasted.
Thirty-eight per cent of adult children of divorce have their own children, 17% of which were born out of wedlock. In the comparison group, 61% have children, all in the context of marriage. Children of divorce were five times as likely to marry before age 25 and had a much higher divorce rate.
From her in-depth interviews over the years with her subjects, Ms. Wallerstein concludes the key effect of divorce on children is the absence of a “couple template” on which they can model their own intimate relationships later in life. Even the best stepparents rarely replace what children lose through divorce, she concludes.
The children of divorce she followed tended to grow up highly self-reliant and professionally successful, but they were plagued by the expectation that their relationships will fail.
“They are really, really frightened. They’re afraid of betrayal, of loss and of abandonment because that has been their experience at least one time,” says Ms. Blakeslee.
The researchers found that nature and level of conflict in marriages were similar in families that divorced and in a comparison group of intact families from the same neighbourhoods. But children whose parents stayed together despite serious marital problems had a better sense of how to behave in their own marriages.
“They have a template of how a man and woman can co-operate and work out problems. They can also say, ‘I don’t want to be like my parents’,” she says.
The book does not recommend that parents stay in bad marriages at all costs, but urges parents to put a higher weight on the impact of their children when considering the costs and benefits of divorce.
“All the focus has been on the immediate crisis time of the divorce, but we’ve had our eyes on the wrong ball. It’s the long years afterward that we should be concerned about,” she says.