Divorce often hurts children, everyone agrees. It can cause great pain, anger, anxiety, confusion and behavior problems in the first couple of years of the breakup. And for some it leads to lasting anxiety, insecurity and fear of having close relationships with other people.
Most children recover, though it may take years, and go on to find happiness and success in marriage, work and life. Experts agree about that, too.
But from this general accord arises a heated dispute between those who emphasize the pain and those who think more attention should be paid to the children’s recovery.
Dr. E. Mavis Hetherington, emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has recently accentuated the more positive prognosis for children of divorce with the publication of her new book, “For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered,” written with John Kelly and published in January by Norton.
And in doing so, she has brought this long-running argument among social scientists back into the public spotlight.
“Divorcing is a high-risk situation,” Dr. Hetherington said. “But most kids are able to adapt. They’re resilient in the long run.”
Her studies over the past 30 years have found that 20 percent to 25 percent of children whose parents divorce are at risk for lifelong emotional or behavioral problems, compared with only 10 percent of children whose parents stay married.
“Now, that twofold increase is not to be taken lightly,” Dr. Hetherington said. “It’s larger than the association between smoking and cancer. But it also means that 75 to 80 percent are functioning in the normal range, and some are functioning remarkably well.”
The other side of the debate is represented by Dr. Judith S. Wallerstein, a co-author of “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study” (Hyperion, 2000), written with Dr. Julia M. Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee, a contributing science writer for The New York Times. The book concentrates on how children of divorce struggle with loneliness and anxiety, especially over love and commitment.
Dr. Wallerstein found that children of divorce, after suffering the breakups and then growing up in fragmented families, end up ill prepared to form their own intimate relationships.
“I am not saying these young people don’t recover,” Dr. Wallerstein said. “I’m saying they come to adulthood burdened, frightened and worried about failure. They want love. They want commitment. They want what everybody else wants. But they’re very afraid they’ll never get it.”
The differences between the two researchers are partly of the half-full or half-empty kind. “We’re not against each other,” Dr. Hetherington said. “When I read Judy’s books, I always learn something. But you know Judy has a gloom and doom approach to divorce.”
“I don’t have a gloom and doom approach,” Dr. Wallerstein responded, “but I do think we’ve underestimated the cost on the child.”
Their differences also have to do with how the researchers went about their work. Each spent the past three decades studying white middle-class families, mainly those that broke apart in the early 1970’s, when the divorce rate was taking its last giant step to 50 percent of all marriages.
But Dr. Wallerstein, a clinical psychologist, did her own interviews with children and parents, while Dr. Hetherington, assisted by a cadre of researchers, interviewed the children and parents and observed the families interacting in their homes.
Dr. Hetherington’s subjects kept journals of their actions and feelings and were given standardized personality tests. Reports were gathered from parents and peers.
Dr. Wallerstein’s study involved 59 divorced families. She interviewed the children and parents five times over 25 years, and she compared them with 44 adults who had grown up in intact families.
Dr. Hetherington looked at more than 1,400 families, roughly half divorced and half not divorced. For many, data were collected seven different times over the course of 24 years.
Critics have often said that Dr. Wallerstein examined too few families.
Her work, said Dr. Andrew Cherlin, professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, “is a very valuable exposition of what can happen when divorce goes bad.”
“But where I have a problem,” he said, “is where she claims that her 60 families are representative of all divorces.”
Dr. Hetherington’s sample is considered more representative of white middle-class families, and her standards of data collection are viewed as more scientifically rigorous. Still, some argue that Dr. Hetherington’s study could not have exposed as much anguish as Dr. Wallerstein found.
But Dr. Norval D. Glenn, professor of sociology at the University of Texas, said he believed that Dr. Wallerstein dug much more deeply. “She got at something I think the standardized instruments wouldn’t necessarily pick up on,” he said.
The two researchers did arrive at certain similar conclusions. Each found, for example, that children of divorce, especially girls, often took responsibility for other family members’ comfort. But each put her own spin on the story of how that happened.
Dr. Hetherington describes 8-year-old Jeannie, who does the laundry and the cooking when her mother is disabled by chronic fatigue syndrome just after her divorce. She also bathes her little brother and reads a story to him each night before bed. Jeannie is able to cope, Dr. Hetherington finds, because her mother does not lean too hard on her, for too long, and she provides love all the while.
Eventually Jeannie grows up happy, well-adjusted and enhanced by her experience.
“As long as the child has some support, divorce can have a steeling effect,” Dr. Hetherington said. “Girls become stronger and more able to cope with future challenges.” Dr. Wallerstein tells the story of Karen, who, as a 12-year-old, becomes the substitute parent for her younger siblings. She stays home from school to console her depressed mother, and she does the shopping for her father.
Karen, too, ends up happy, but not until after she suffers through a rocky period in her early adulthood, when she lives with a man she does not love or respect, because she knows he will not leave her. Even years later, after she has married someone else, she avoids all conflict with her husband.
Karen was a child of high integrity, and so eventually she pulls away and becomes a happy and loving mother of her own children and a very good wife,” Dr. Wallerstein said. “But what doesn’t leave her ever is the fear that when she goes to sleep at night, she won’t have it all in the morning.”
With divorced fathers, each researcher observed behavior varying from total abandonment of the children to strong bonding. But Dr. Hetherington calls attention to fathers she describes as “divorce-activated,” those who are jolted into realizing how much their children mean to them. These fathers, Dr. Hetherington believes, end up forging closer ties with their children than they might have built if they had stayed married and relegated the parental duties to their wives.
Dr. Wallerstein found that most divorced fathers, 70 percent of those she studied, did not pay their children’s college expenses. Only 10 percent of the fathers who remained married declined to pay. This lack of support, she said, was a big reason why just 70 percent of the children of divorce went to college at all, compared with 85 percent of their high school classmates.
“The fathers said, Look, I did everything the law expected me to do, but this is where the road ends,” Dr. Wallerstein said, noting that most support obligations expire when a child turns 18.
Dr. Hetherington found a similar lack of support, but not as widespread.
Only 35 percent of her divorced fathers paid absolutely nothing for their children’s higher education. “Of course, you get much less financial support from a divorced father,” she said. “The ones who stay in there are the ones have felt they have some control over the decision making in their kids’ lives.”
She finds reason for optimism, however, in her observation that today, about a third of divorced fathers are seeing their children at least once a week, compared with only a fourth of fathers in the 1970’s. “They could do a lot better,” Dr. Hetherington said, “but there is a trend in a good direction.”
Children of divorce have more than the average difficulty with marriages of their own. Women in this group are twice as likely as other women to end up divorced, according to Dr. Glenn of the University of Texas. For men, the risk is 30 percent higher.
The reason for this increased risk, Dr. Wallerstein maintains, is that children of divorce have grown up without good role models.
When they, too, face divorce, she said, “It’s the nightmare they’ve worried about come to life.”
Dr. Hetherington questions whether the children’s problems with marriage are entirely attributable to the parents’ divorces. Perhaps the memories of the strife before the divorces also have an effect, she said. Or, perhaps the children are predisposed to unstable unions.
“I don’t mean that there might be a divorce gene lurking somewhere,” Dr. Hetherington said, “but that characteristics such as antisocial behavior, irritability, impulsivity, lack of adaptability, which we know have to some extent a genetic basis, contribute to divorce.”
Other experts pay tribute to both Dr. Wallerstein and Dr. Hetherington, even as they line up on opposite sides of the argument.
“Mavis Hetherington is an outstanding scholar,” said Dr. David Popenoe, director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. “Nobody is saying that her data is off. But just because you are functioning seemingly well in later life, does that mean you still haven’t been hurt and maybe hurt badly in some psychological way by divorce?”
Dr. Kyle D. Pruett, a psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, said: “I don’t think one of these people is right and one is wrong. But I believe that the public would find it reassuring to have somebody of Mavis’s stature say, `Look, divorce is a process, and you have some control in how it works out.’ There are some good ways and bad ways of doing it, but it is not a relational death sentence to the children or to the adults.”