Today’s Slate carries a retrospective on Judith Wallerstein, who died last month, by her professional collaborator Sandra Blakeslee. Wallerstein was one of the first social scientists to study the impact of divorce on children.
Blakeslee opens with a fascinating vignette on how Wallerstein first looked into researching divorce because an encounter with a friend of her daughter’s convinced her that the impact of divorce might be both minor and transient. This was the first generation of children raised with liberalized divorce laws, and it looked to Wallerstein like they were going to make the adjustment reasonably well.
That theory didn’t survive its enounters with the data. Here’s how Blakeslee summarizes the findings of Wallerstein’s life’s work:
- The effects of divorce on children are not transient. They are long-lasting and profound, persisting well into adulthood.
- The quality of the post-divorce family is critical. Parents are told “don’t fight” but the issue is much bigger. Beyond custody and visiting plans, children need to be fully supported as they grow up. Few are.
- Age matters. Little ones, ages 2 to 6, are terrified of abandonment. Elementary-school-age children, 7 to 11, grow resentful when deprived of opportunities they would have had if their parents had stayed together. Preadolescents, ages 11 and 12, can be seduced by what Judy called “the voices of the street.” Many teenagers, taking on the role of parent, become overburdened.
- Stepfamilies are laden with land mines that no one sees coming.
You knew all that already, of course. But Wallerstein didn’t, and she followed the data. As a social scientist myself, I can tell you, that’s a lot harder than it sounds when you actually have to do it – even when your findings don’t scandalize your peers and damage your career!
Yet today, these findings aren’t scandalous any more. The boundaries can move. Good, sound science like Wallerstein did is part of what helps move them. In spite of social science’s track record, I’m increasingly convinced it’s going to be a more and more constructive contributor to the sum of human wisdom in the century ahead. And on no human subject is wisdom more needed than on this one. Check out the Slate piece.
July 13th, 2012 | 7:01 pm
Wallerstein’s work is all the more impressive because it was clinical research — she was not working with large data sets and representative samples, she was just, as she put it, “talking to children.” For years people who didn’t like her findings criticized her on exactly these grounds (she was just talking to few affluent kids in Morin County0 — until Andrew Cherlin and others, some years later, DID test her findings using representative national samples of informants and found that, yes, Wallerstein had been right all along on almost all the main points.
Personally, she was generous, wise, forgiving, and very funny — a wonderful friend to so many people.
July 15th, 2012 | 9:59 pm
When I was in my twenties, my parents divorced. This event was long-anticipated, and even hoped for. What I did not expect, as a child of the seventies, was the way it destroyed my family and colored the young adulthood of my sisters and myself. Finding Wallerstein’s first book was enlightening – the first hint that my experience was not only possible, but normative. Thank God for her integrity.
July 16th, 2012 | 9:12 am
Even though it was said my parents divorced for the very best reasons, it turned out to be a crippling disaster to me and my brother. Folks didn’t want to hear about problems a child from a broken home had growing up. It seemed to me that a large responsibility for a “successful”, “positive” and “healthy” divorce aftermath had been put on my shoulders. “After all, you don’t want to be the monkey wrench in the works…do you?”
They say one cannot control what happens to you but you can control how you react to the circumstances. The problem is children have to clue how to react and negotiate among the landmines so many adults pretend aren’t there.
Years later, while relating my story, one clergyman proposed that it would have helped a lot if the church had a “divorce ritual” which in part would address the children and say the divorce was not their fault and both parents continue to love and support them. I replied that I would have had no respect for any church that collaborated with adults in their efforts to absolve themselves in advance for the evil that would befall their children. I would have cursed that church to my dying day.
July 16th, 2012 | 12:18 pm
There’s a passage in the Old Testament–psalms I think–where God’s law is praised for giving wisdom to the simple.
It’s interesting how we simpletons who don’t do social science have known for about 2000 years or more what social science continues(sometimes breathlessly, or with some element of surprise) to “discover” and “reveal” to us!
July 16th, 2012 | 12:28 pm
Divorce is a scourge. Short of the risk of serious violence, people who have children together should simply stay married for the sake of their kids. That is the obvious import of the research, but oddly enough, it is not a conclusion that the researchers seem to articulate. Instead they seek to ameliorate the obvious harms. Why not just prevent the harms by urging couples to come up with whatever hollow marriage arrangements they can negotiate?
July 16th, 2012 | 1:34 pm
. . . people who have children together should simply stay married for the sake of their kids. That is the obvious import of the research, but oddly enough, it is not a conclusion that the researchers seem to articulate.
Sally Rogers,
It is a conclusion the researchers have no way to support. No matter how devastating divorce may be on children, there is no way (that I know of) to do a really solid study on the effects of divorce compared to the effects of remaining together solely for the sake of the children. The ideal study, which obviously cannot be done, would be to take a large number of couples with children who wanted to divorce, and randomly divide them into two groups, one of which would be allowed to divorce and one of which would be required to remain together until the children were grown.
It’s difficult to imagine there would not be significant ill effects as a result of being raised by parents who were staying together solely to provide an intact home for their children. As to whether those ill effects would be more or less severe than those of a carefully executed divorce it would seem very difficult to know.
July 16th, 2012 | 2:40 pm
I am a little surprised that the excellent article in the New York Times titled Two Classes, Divided by “I Do” was not at least among today’s First Links. It is a contrast between intact families and single-parent families, largely from an economic viewpoint, but it makes a powerful case in favor of marriage.
July 16th, 2012 | 8:04 pm
Judith Wallerstein’s outstanding contributions to understanding the impact of the divorce plague upon youth and young adults has motivated many mental health professionals to increase their efforts to understand and to work to resolve the powerful conscious and unconscious conflicts that interfere with marital happiness, particularly selfishness that many Popes have referred to as the major enemy of marital love.
July 17th, 2012 | 11:38 am
Wallerstein’s outstanding research and writing on the long term damage to children and young adults is used by many mental health professionals to encourage couples who are considering divorce to commit themselves to grow in self-knowledge and to resolve their conflicts.
Also, often cited to couples is Norval Glenn’s research that the proportion of emotionally troubled adults is about three times greater among those whose parents divorced as among those from intact families. His research at the University of Texas at Austin found that only about a third of divorced respondents to a national survey conducted by the Office of Survey Research said that both they and their ex-spouses worked hard enough to try to save the marriage.
He concluded, “No amount of adult success can compensate for an unhappy childhood or erase the memory of the pain and confusion of the divided world of the child of divorce” (Dr. Norval Glenn, U.Texas, Austin, in Between Two Worlds, E. Marquadt, 2007).
Fortunately, marital conflicts can be resolved and divorce and the life-long damage to children can be prevented.
July 20th, 2012 | 11:02 am
[...] Forster at First Thoughts remembers Judith [...]
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