By Randy Hicks, President of Georgia Family Council
For years, I have spoken and written, including here in this column, about the destructive and most often visible effects of divorce on children. The increased likelihood of delinquency, drug abuse, unwed sexual activity and more have been well-documented and well-known for some time. These trends are important to acknowledge and understand. But there is more to this story.
Many children of divorce manage to avoid these severe consequences, but they still experience emotional disruption that takes place below the surface and affects them for years.
Elizabeth Marquardt is a respected researcher and scholar. She is also a child of divorce whose parents split up when she was three. Her life was not marked by delinquency, but she knew that her parent’s divorce had a profound impact on her.
To learn more, Elizabeth undertook a groundbreaking three-year study into the emotional and spiritual lives of children whose parents had divorced. She interviewed 71 adults and randomly surveyed 1,500 more between the ages of 18 and 35. Both groups were divided evenly between those from divorced families and those from intact families. Her findings culminated into her book “Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.”
What she discovered was both fascinating and troubling.
Children of divorce, she observes, must travel alone between each of their parent’s worlds and make sense of their sometimes dramatically different set of values, beliefs and ways of living. Meanwhile, children in intact homes do not bear this responsibility because their married parents are the ones who reconcile their personal differences. Children from divorced homes must inherit this role and make sense of it all, often at a young age.
Elizabeth’s research found that children from divorced homes were: more likely to say they had to be different person with each parent; much more likely to say they were afraid of resembling one of their parents because it may make them an outsider in the other parent’s world; twice as likely to be asked to keep secrets, with many more feeling their own need to keep secrets because they have learned some information may spark anxiety or hurt in a parent. In effect they became a divided person—vacillating between two homes and not knowing how to be their whole, true self with anyone.
Living in two worlds also forces children to become what Elizabeth refers to as “early moral forgers.” This means that they must answer fundamental questions about life such as “who am I” and “what is right and wrong” at a young age while navigating between two contrasting value systems. They are forced to navigate on their own through issues that children in married homes presuppose because their parents have worked them out together.
Recounting her own struggle with life after her parent’s divorce and the testimony of the dozens of others she interviewed makes Elizabeth’s findings compelling, but quite honestly heartbreaking too. Today tens of thousands of kids are silently struggling through life and into adulthood with the emotional baggage they must bear in the aftermath of their parent’s divorce.
With that in mind, she is understandably angry at those in our culture who continue to mislead parents and children into thinking that there is such a thing as a “good divorce”—the idea that if parents get divorced, but do so harmoniously, and each remain involved in their child’s life, things will be fine. Elizabeth challenges this popular notion writing, “While a ‘good divorce’ is better than a bad divorce, it is still not good. For no matter how amicable divorced parents might be and how much they each love and care for the child, their willingness to do these things does absolutely nothing to diminish the radical restructuring of the child’s universe.”
Elizabeth is right and her research backs this up. At the same time let me clearly state that neither she nor I are condemning all divorce. Divorced parents endure a lot of pain and many find themselves in those circumstances against their wishes. And certainly there are some instances when divorce is necessary and important. The most obvious example is a case where a spouse and child are in physical danger.
But keep in mind that one-third of divorces end a high-conflict marriage that involved physical abuse or extreme arguing. This means that a vast majority (two-thirds) of divorces end low-conflict marriages where the couple felt unfulfilled or unhappy, but faced no serious danger.
These marriages are often salvageable. And Elizabeth’s research tells us loud and clear why these marriages are worth saving. Incidentally, she points out that children do worse after low-conflict couples divorce because the divorce “marks their first exposure to a serious problem. One day, without much warning, their world just falls apart.”
I recognize the pain and complexity of divorce. And that is why I believe more should be done to acknowledge that divorce is hard on kids, regardless of how the parents conduct themselves. Perhaps by doing so, children of divorce will feel better understood and be less likely to have to grapple with the often unexplainable struggles they endure.
Equally important is my hope that if more couples better understand the impact that a divorce will have in the lives of their children, maybe they will be less likely to consider getting one.
Nobody’s home life or marriage is perfect, but as Elizabeth Marquardt points out so well, living and growing up in one world is certainly better than forging your way between two.
Georgia Family Council is a non-profit research and education organization committed to fostering conditions in which individuals, families and communities thrive. For more information, go to www.georgiafamily.org, (770) 242-0001, stephen.daniels@georgiafamily.org.
