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For
Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered,
by E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly (Norton, 307 pp., $26.95)
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Mavis Hetherington is one of the nation's most respected research
psychologists. Her new book (with writer John Kelly) has been marketed
as a rebuttal to divorce critics, who — she believes —
have overestimated the negative effects of divorce and downplayed
its benefits.
All the headlines
have gone to Hetherington's bottom line: The majority of children
of divorce, she reassures worried parents, are functioning in the
normal range 20 years later: "Most were successfully going
about the chief tasks of young adulthood: establishing careers,
creating intimate relationships, building meaningful lives."
But E. Mavis
Hetherington is too good a scholar to have 20 years of research
summed up in sound bites. This book is a report for lay readers
on three different — and important — long-running studies
designed to assess the effects of divorce. The studies ultimately
involved 1,400 families; in other words, when it comes to the case
against the case against divorce, this is as good as it gets.
How good is
that?
Adults, first.
Men and women divorced for different reasons, says Hetherington.
Women complained about lack of intimacy and affection; men complained
about lack of sex and overly critical wives. Infidelity, abuse,
and alcoholism were present, but in a minority of divorces.
Adults choose to divorce, then, not mostly to escape from violent
hellholes, but because they are lonely, bored, depressed, dissatisfied.
How often does divorce deliver on its seductive promise of a better
life? Hetherington's sample consists mostly of white, middle-class,
and relatively well-educated men and women. Yet even among this
advantaged group, the answer is: Surprisingly seldom.
Hetherington
judges that 20 years after a divorce, only about 20 percent of divorced
individuals (most of them women) were Enhancers, whose lives were
improved by the divorce. Another 10 percent became what Hetherington
calls Competent Loners — whether divorce improved their lives
is not clear. For about 40 percent, divorce was a tumult that made
no difference: "Different partners, different marriages, but
usually the same problems." The remaining 30 percent were in
various stages of just plain miserable: Hetherington uses words
like "desperately unhappy," "empty, pointless,"
"clinically depressed," "joyless," and "embittered"
to describe how they felt about their lives.
Casual sex
had a particularly negative effect on divorced women, notes Hetherington.
The seven suicides she observed were all women and all triggered
(she tells us) by casual sex. Men got bored with casual sex, too,
but it took them two years, on average. (The ennui of meaningless
sex eventually drove many a man to remarriage, but never to suicide.)
How good, then,
is divorce for adults? Hetherington's work is peppered with data
that are far from reassuring. Sentences like this, for example:
"Behaviors like Peeping Tomism and harassing birds are worrisome,
but they are also fairly normal in the first year after a divorce,
as are erratic mood swings, vulnerability to psychological disorders
and physical illness, and doubts about the decision to leave."
Those who have entered the wacky world where Peeping Toms and bird
assaults are fairly normal will no doubt be relieved to know there
is a light at the end of the tunnel; the rest of us may be forgiven
for thinking that jumping down that particular black hole sounds
even less fun than one imagined.
What about
the divorced people who were better off in the long run — what
made the difference for them? The answer, ironically, is marriage.
Hetherington found that "people in long-lasting, gratifying
first and second marriages were better off economically, and had
the lowest rates of depression, substance abuse, conduct disorders,
health complaints, and visits to the doctor" — along with
a more satisfying sex life.
Hetherington's
study thus confirms the research of others on the critical importance
of a good-enough marriage to adult well-being. But something about
contemporary mores is seriously undermining the road to a good marriage.
Only one-third of the grown children Hetherington studied (from
intact and disrupted families) who were in the first seven years
of marriage were very happily married, compared to over half of
their parents at that stage; 38 percent reported facing a serious
marital problem, compared to 20 percent of their parents at the
same juncture. A good marriage is as important as it ever was, but
apparently younger Americans are finding it harder and harder to
achieve.
That's the
upshot of Hetherington's study insofar as it concerns adults. But
what about the kids? Should parents contemplating divorce relax?
On this issue,
the results reported in For Better or for Worse are consistent
with a large and growing social-science literature: Even among advantaged,
middle-class white children, divorce doubles the risk that 20
years later the grown children will experience serious social,
emotional, and/or psychological dysfunction. "Twenty-five percent
of youths from divorced families in comparison to 10 percent from
non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, or psychological
problems." Money didn't matter: Even when family incomes were
similar, children from disrupted homes had more long-term dysfunction.
Three-quarters
of children of divorce do function normally; does that mean the
glass is only one-quarter empty? It is important to recognize the
limitations inherent in the definition of damage Hetherington uses.
Many children who are functioning in the normal range psychologically
may be suffering in other ways. A child who does not go to a good
college because her parents divorced is functioning in the normal
range, for example. The 35 percent of girls in remarried homes who
started menstruating before age 12 (compared to 18 percent of girls
from intact homes) are certainly functioning normally. The increased
risk of premature sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and teen pregnancy
in children of divorce is mentioned by Hetherington, but only in
passing.
Children of
divorce in this study also had roughly double the divorce rate of
children from low-conflict intact families, and a higher divorce
risk even than children raised in unhappy marriages. Why? A lower
commitment to marital permanence and fewer relationship skills,
says Hetherington. Seventy percent of children of divorce who married
had relatively permissive views of divorce, compared to 40 percent
of spouses from intact families. Their best chance of marital success
was to marry a child from an intact family.
One of the
most consistent effects of divorce, even in white middle-class kids,
was estrangement from the father. Very few of the highly educated
and successful divorced men figured out how to be effective fathers
outside of marriage. Twenty years later, about two-thirds of boys
and three-quarters of girls had poor relationships with their fathers
— compared to 30 percent of children from intact marriages.
The most poignant
moment in the book is when Hetherington admits that "at the
end of my study, a fair number of my adult children of divorce described
themselves as permanently 'scarred.' But objective assessments of
these 'victims' told a different story." What counts as damage
has to be on Prof. Hetherington's checklist of dysfunctions defined
by answers to multiple-choice questionnaires. The advantage, of
course, is that these kinds of assessments are less likely to be
influenced by the investigator's bias; but the equally obvious disadvantage
is an enormous loss of sensitivity. When children of divorce try
to tell Hetherington their own stories of more subtle, lingering
emotional difficulties, she dismisses these as "self-fulfilling
prophecy." If you have a job and a girlfriend, but you do not
have your dad, does that count as damage? Not in Hetherington's
book: You are functioning in the normal range, end of story.
Why would a
top scholar such as Hetherington, whose own work recapitulates and
confirms a growing consensus on the potential long-term negative
effects of divorce, choose to minimize these effects in presenting
her research to the public? Partly it is because she has a genuine
admiration and respect for the personal growth divorce sometimes
prompts, especially in women: Divorce winners do exist, most of
them women who rise to meet and beat the considerable challenges
divorce poses for mothers. Partly it is because Hetherington has
defined down the damage caused by divorce, so that it includes only
those consequences that can be categorized as social-science pathologies.
Certainly children
of divorce need to know they are not damaged goods; human beings
can rise above their circumstances. And certainly men and women
who are already divorced need good advice on how to minimize the
damage and maximize their opportunities. But the potential danger
stemming from Hetherington's well-meaning message of encouragement
is what it may convey to parents: Go ahead and divorce, your kids
will do fine.
For concerned
parents contemplating divorce, the news that 20 years later one-fourth
of kids are seriously dysfunctional surely cannot be treated as
good news. In no other context would responsible parents say, "Gee,
only a one out of four chance I will permanently damage my child?
Go for it!"
But by framing
the data in these terms, Hetherington raises an even deeper question:
How much pain are parents entitled to inflict on their children,
simply because their children may rise above it and avoid long-term
psychological dysfunction? Like scholar Judith Wallerstein before
her, Hetherington finds that even when divorce does not result in
long-term damage, it is "usually brutally painful . . . To
the boys and girls in my research divorce seemed cataclysmic and
inexplicable. How could a child feel safe in a world where adults
had suddenly become untrustworthy?"
One of Hetherington's
success stories is a woman named Bethany. As an adult, she is doing
extremely well, thanks to her mother's heroic parenting. I certainly
do not blame her mother for choosing divorce — her husband's
repeated infidelities were one proximate cause. And yet this is
what divorce meant for Bethany: "The previously placid Bethany
also would fly into rages, hitting and biting her mother, whom she
blamed for the separation. In her distress, she began to wet the
bed again, had night terrors, and would wake crying or crawl into
bed with [her mother] three or four times a night. Bethany later
said, 'I had to keep checking to see if Mom was there. If Dad could
leave, why couldn't she?'"
The larger
questions raised by these emotional realities of divorce are not,
ultimately, scholarly ones. How and when can it be right for mothers
and fathers to cause brutal pain to their children? If the human
spirit is indeed resilient, can't enterprising adults perhaps find
some other path to personal growth? How much are our ideas about
the relative harmlessness of divorce undermining our ability to
build the lasting love we crave?
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