[Mb-civic] WORTH A LOOK: There's no 'good' divorce - Elizabeth Marquardt - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  There's no 'good' divorce

By Elizabeth Marquardt  |  November 28, 2005  |  The Boston Globe

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."

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/11/28/theres_no_good_divorce/
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