Divorced Kid

by Sasha Aslanian, Minnesota Public Radio

(excerpt)

St. Paul, Minn. — In 1979, America was reeling from divorce. The divorce rate hit a historic high, and even the Academy Award for Best Picture that year went to a drama portraying a wrenching custody battle.

Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep starred as the estranged couple, “Kramer vs. Kramer,” locked in a custody battle over their young son.

The kid they were fighting over doesn’t have much of a voice in the movie. There was a whole generation of kids just like him.

Avery Corman wrote the novel the movie was based on. Corman remembers attending a screening for the film, and when the lights came up at the end, he noticed teenagers all around him, just slumped in their seats.

“And I knew exactly who they were,” said Corman.

Corman himself was a child of divorce. Growing up in a middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1940s, Corman remembers being virtually the only kid on his block and in his school whose parents were divorced. His father left when he was 5, and he never saw him again.

“It was a kind of family secret,” said Corman. “And as a result, I think I was walking around with a secret. And I think I just became more of a remote kid than I might have normally been.”

By the time he wrote “Kramer vs. Kramer” in the mid-1970s, divorce was much more commonplace and the stigma was rapidly disappearing.

In 1969, California became the first state to pass “no-fault” divorce, which meant you didn’t have to prove infidelity or abandonment. You could just be fed up and call it quits. In the ’70s, no-fault laws spread to other states and the divorce rate ticked up.

But Corman still guarded his own secret.

Then, a school girl from the Midwest wrote to him and asked, “Were your parents divorced?” Corman wrote back, “Yes.”

. …

A SOCIAL REVOLUTION

Judith Wallerstein has sat on many a television studio couch, advising the nation on children and divorce. She’s a pioneer in the field. When she started, it was a barren landscape.

Back in the early 1970s, Wallerstein was teaching at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California, Berkeley. She taught a class on working with troubled children. She began getting calls from teachers and parents asking for help. Children of divorcing parents were acting out and having behavior problems.

“So I took myself to the Berkeley library, which is one of the greatest libraries in America, and I found that there was no research, there was absolutely no study. We had embarked on this major social revolution without any knowledge about how it might affect children,” said Wallerstein.

So she launched her own study, with 131 kids in Marin County whose parents got divorced in 1971. Wallerstein interviewed them about their feelings and experiences. She kept following them for decades and wrote bestselling books about her findings.

The prevailing wisdom at the time was that if the parents were better off getting out of the marriage, the kids would be better off, too.

Wallerstein’s young study subjects didn’t agree. Eventually, other researchers would confirm what the kids were saying — they struggled more with mental health problems, trouble in school and relationships.

“It’s one of the few issues in a society where what’s best for the parents is not necessarily best for the children,” said Wallerstein.

After divorce, Wallerstein noticed different trajectories for parents and kids. For grownups, the divorce was the low point. But within three years, they tended to recover and move on with their lives.

For children, it wasn’t so linear. They felt the aftershocks during adolescence when they defined who they were, and again in early adulthood as they created their own relationships.

Other researchers contend Wallerstein’s findings are too full of doom and gloom. But Wallerstein wanted parents to see divorce from a child’s point of view. What the kids told her was tough to hear.

“They said, ‘The day they divorced was the day my childhood ended,’” said Wallerstein.

…

UNDERSTANDING THE DIVORCE CYCLE

In the 1970s, people weren’t sure how divorce would affect kids. Thirty years later, the children of divorce have left a long paper trail.

Nick Wolfinger is a demographer from the University of Utah who pores over giant data sets from the National Survey of Families and Households, tracking children of divorce.

“The bad news is that you really are much more likely to get divorced as an adult if your parents divorced, and parental divorce really does affect almost every aspect of your behavior in your own relationships,” said Wolfinger.

Wolfinger’s academic book has the ominous title: “Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in their Own Marriages.” It’s like reading a mathematical proof that you’re doomed.

“This is why I’m so much fun at weddings,” Wolfinger quipped.

When people ask what the bride and groom’s chances are, Wolfinger said he cherrypicks the most optimistic data for the happy couple. He does have some advice for the rest of us.

“You really are much more likely to get divorced as an adult if your parents divorced.”

“If you want to stay married, marry someone just like you. Except if you’re from a divorced family, marry someone from an intact family,” said Wolfinger.

That’s because Wolfinger found when either the husband or wife was a child of divorce, those marriages were almost twice as likely to dissolve as marriages where neither spouse came from a divorced family.

Marriages between two spouses from divorced families were more than three times as likely to fail. Wolfinger finds children of divorce are more likely to cut and run.

“If you experience relationships as transitory while growing up, that’s what you’ll do as an adult,” he said.

(Click HERE to read the full article.)

For a Palmetto Family article on the legacy of No-Fault Divorce in America, read A Sad Anniversary.

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