Text 16398, 88 rader
Skriven 2005-12-01 14:01:50 av Alan Hess
Ärende: no good divorce
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Boston.com     
The Boston Globe
ELIZABETH MARQUARDT
There's no 'good' divorce

By Elizabeth Marquardt  |  November 28, 2005

A LITTLE boy scores a goal on the soccer field while his divorced mom and dad,
sitting in the stands, cheer him on. A little girl takes a bow after the school
play as her divorced mom and dad applaud wildly. At graduations, at weddings,
at bar mitzvahs and confirmations, the scene is repeated -- divorced parents
having what some call a ''good" divorce.

Many experts and parents embrace the idea, confident that it's not divorce
itself that harms children but simply the way that parents divorce. If divorced
parents stay involved with their child and don't fight with each other, they
say, then children will be fine.

There's only one problem. It's not true.

In a first-ever national study, the grown children of divorce tell us there's
no such thing as a ''good" divorce. This nationally representative telephone
survey of 1,500 young adults, half from divorced families and half from intact
families -- supplemented with more than 70 in-person interviews conducted
around the country -- reveals that any kind of divorce, whether amicable or
not, sows lasting inner conflict in children's lives.

Only a small minority of grown children of divorce -- just one-fifth -- say
their parents had a lot of conflict after their divorce, but the conflict
between their parents' worlds did not go away. Instead, the tough job of making
sense of their parents' different beliefs, values, and ways of living became
the child's job alone.

As a result, many grown children of divorce say they felt divided inside. They
recall having to be extremely vigilant, holding a magnifying glass up to both
parents' worlds in order to figure out how to survive in them. One young woman
remembered: ''I knew very young how my parents were. To me it was just obvious
-- like, this is how mom is, this is how dad is. This is how you learn to deal
with them. . . We lived with my mom, and we stayed with my dad the whole month
of July. So you actually had a substantial amount of time to live with that
person and understand their personality. What makes them tick, what makes them
laugh, what makes them angry. You think all the time."

Many grown children of divorce told us they rose to the challenge by becoming a
different person with each of their parents.

In divorced families, they told us, secrets are epidemic. The grown children of
divorce are twice as likely to agree that their parents asked them to keep
important secrets, but many more of them said they felt the need to keep
secrets even when their parents did not ask them to. Their parents seemed
enormously vulnerable after divorce, and the children quickly learned that
sensitive information, perhaps about their other parent's new love interest or
finances, could spark anger or hurt. They soon learned to keep much of what
happened in each world to themselves. When they grow up, there are large parts
of each of their lives that the other parent knows virtually nothing about.

The grown children of divorce also report that the job of traveling between two
worlds, struggling alone to make sense of them, is a lonely one. They are three
times more likely to agree, ''I was alone a lot as a child," and seven times
more likely to strongly agree with that sentiment. Over and over, their stories
made it clear that being the only link between your parents' two worlds is a
lonely place for a child to be. When parents are married, the whole family gets
together because, well, that's what families do. When parents are divorced,
they get together only because of the child. That's a big burden for the child
on the soccer field or school stage to carry.

Some marriages are brutal, and divorce is a vital safety valve. But two-thirds
of divorces today end low-conflict marriages. Most marriages end not because
the parents are at each other's throats but for other, less urgent reasons. Too
many parents are led astray by the ''good" divorce idea and think that, if only
they divorce the right way, they can end their good enough marriage and their
child will be unscarred. But this study found, quite the contrary, that in many
ways children of ''good" divorces fare worse than children of unhappy marriages
-- so long as those marriages are low-conflict -- and they fare far worse than
children of happy marriages.

Today, one-quarter of young adults are from divorced families. Their message to
our society is clear: Divorce is sometimes necessary, but for children there is
no such thing as a ''good" divorce.

Elizabeth Marquardt, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values,
is author of the just-published ''Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of
Children of Divorce." 
+ Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
 

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