Few things enrage me more than outright dishonesty, and one of those is outright dishonesty in the service of doing harm to children. There is an entire cottage industry of media devoted to reassuring parents that divorce is not bad for children. The reason why there is an evergreen market for this is obvious: guilt. Divorced parents need desperately to believe that they are not being selfish and making their children miserable, so they are fed a steady stream of reassurance from center-left media sources.
So we get things such as today’s Slate column by Gail Cornwall and Scott Coltrane entitled, “How Americans Became Convinced Divorce Is Bad for Kids.” As with many apologetics from this corner these days, blame is instead directed at the socially accepted targets: “Most of the problems associated with being a child of divorce are instead related to sexism, racism, homophobia, shoddy recordkeeping, and insufficient government support.” We are darkly warned that ” there were incentives for some people to cast children as victims” to hold back “increasing female employment and independence.”
And yet, even the authors acknowledge that their argument runs contrary to the common wisdom of human experience: “Many Americans think it’s a shame that only 70 percent of children in the U.S. live in one home with two parents and under 50 percent live with two biological, married parents. They see divorce and single parenthood as normal yet still unfortunate, since accepted wisdom says children suffer long-term, irreparable harm when their parents live separately.” Perhaps they believe these things because they are true and easily observed by anyone with elementary empathy for children, or for adults who used to be children.
But the biggest problem with the whole argument is that it relies entirely on what can be quantified by data, and ignores both the actual human experience of children who have been through divorce, and the fact that having a big chunk of your childhood ruined is a pretty terrible thing by itself. Never fear, Cornwall and Coltrane tell us: those kids will get over it!
“I would never want to minimize how difficult it is for children to go through that transition,” Ahrons said in an interview with us before her 2021 death, “but it doesn’t mean that they are damaged.” Grief and anxiety fade. Behavior tends to return to normal within two years. A study of 23-year-olds found that 11 percent of those whose parents had divorced suffered from mental health problems, compared with 8 percent of those with married parents. Yet humans underestimate resilience thanks to a bias dubbed “immune neglect.” In reality, researchers have concluded that most children touched by divorce are ultimately well-adjusted, indistinguishable from peers raised in nuclear families.
Yes, people can go on to perfectly well-adjusted lives after a parental divorce, and become law-abiding, economic-value-producing units of adulthood. Many people also went on to perfectly well-adjusted lives after enduring wars, depressions, famines, plagues, slavery, genocide . . . human beings are remarkably resilient creatures, and that fact does not in the least justify robbing children of a mom-and-dad home and putting them through years of family turmoil. Nor is it a reasonable excuse, for that matter, to complain that the government hasn’t stepped up to replace the role that the two parents were supposed to provide.
Even the slightest exposure to actual human beings who have been through a parental divorce could tell you this. Even Hollywood, literature, and music almost invariably paint the experience of divorce as a terrible one (go watch Mad Men or listen to a Kelly Clarkson song). Cornwall and Coltrane cite Kramer v. Kramer, which was a critically praised film because it felt true to people who lived through the divorce boom of the 1970s. Sometimes, no amount of fiddling with the numbers can make us unlearn something that we know from the common experience of humanity.