Divorce Does Have Victims

IF YOU were to believe everything that “experts” have written about divorce during the last few decades, you might conclude that in the modern divorce, nobody is at fault and nobody gets hurt.

Many parents have been eased down the road to divorce by a few widely touted clichés, such as: Divorce is better for the kids than an unhappy marriage; just wait until the children are ‘the right age,’ to spare them any pain; kids bounce back from the trauma after only a couple of years.

Some have bolstered these optimistic notions. For example, authors Susan Gettleman and Janet Markowitz discount “the myth of the damaged child.” They assert that divorce need not be traumatic for children as long as the parents ‘handle it maturely.’ They even argue that a parental divorce may help children to cope with their own divorces some day! They claim: “The real objects of reform ought to be the institution of marriage and the myth of domesticity itself.”​—The Courage to Divorce.

But do such bold assertions really ring true? In a world of escalating divorce rates, what are the real costs of divorce to children? Is it true that nobody gets hurt?

A Terrible Toll

In 1971, U.S. researchers Judith Wallerstein and Joan Berlin Kelly began a landmark study of the long-range effects of divorce on families. They chose 60 families that were in the throes of divorce. Altogether, these families had 131 children between 2 and 18 years of age. To the researchers’ surprise, they found that divorce almost never came as a relief to the children. This was true even when their parents had been unhappily married. Rather, divorce left the children distraught.

Were the effects merely some short-term trauma? Sadly, no. After five years, 37 percent of the children were moderately to severely depressed. Most of them still hoped that their parents would get back together​—even if they had remarried! After 10 or even 15 years, nearly half of the children in the study had “entered adulthood as worried, underachieving, self-deprecating, and sometimes angry young men and women.”

Such results ran against conventional wisdom. As Wallerstein writes: “Our findings were absolutely contradictory to our expectations. This was unwelcome news to a lot of people, and we got angry letters from therapists, parents, and lawyers saying we were undoubtedly wrong.”

The children weren’t lying, though; other studies have confirmed the verdict of Wallerstein and Kelly. The Journal of Social Issues noted that most professionals, such as behavioral scientists, “believe that parental separation and dissolution of marriage have a profound negative impact upon both children and adolescents.” The journal added that such beliefs “have, in large measure, been substantiated,” citing findings such as these: Children of divorce have higher rates of delinquency and antisocial behavior than do children from intact families; the rate of admission of children of divorce to psychiatric hospitals may be twice as high as for children of intact families; divorce is perhaps the leading cause of childhood depression.

What About Older Children?

Older children handle divorce little better than younger ones. When adolescents witness their parents’ divorce, they may suffer a deep disillusionment that sours their view of marriage and other institutions, such as school. Some conclude that all relationships are unreliable, doomed to unravel someday in betrayal and infidelity.

Thrown off balance in this way, some teenagers careen to wild extremes when their parents divorce. Some turn to drugs, some descend to sexual promiscuity, some run away from home. Others seem at first to take the divorce in stride, only to go through a delayed reaction. Perhaps it is no coincidence that, as the magazine The Washingtonian noted, the rise in divorces has seen a parallel rise in teenage eating disorders and even suicides.

So parents who are biding their time, waiting until their children are ‘the right age’ before initiating a divorce, may be in for a long wait. It does not appear that there is a magical ‘right age’ at which children glide through divorce unscathed.a Sociologist Norval D. Glenn even suggested in the magazine Psychology Today that children may suffer from negative effects of divorce that “persist undiminished throughout the lifespan.” He concluded: “One must seriously entertain the disturbing hypothesis that the increased numbers of children of divorce will lead to a slow but steady erosion of the population’s overall level of well-being.”

But these findings, studies, and statistics, grim though they are, do not mean that every child of divorce is destined to lead a troubled life. They do, however, demonstrate that divorce presents a very real danger to children. The question is: How can children be protected from the effects of divorce?

What Hope for the Children?

There is no protection as good as prevention. As Dr. Diane Medved put it in her book The Case Against Divorce: “We’ve got to stop allowing selfish concerns to be the only criteria for the appropriateness of divorce.” There can be little doubt that the self-obsessed, me-first attitude that has permeated modern society has undermined countless marriages. How can married couples fight off this influence and make their marriages last?

The Bible claims that its Author is the Designer of marriage. In confirmation of this claim, the Bible’s advice on marriage actually works. It has helped millions of men and women improve the quality of their family life. The Bible has snatched countless marriages from the jaws of divorce. It can work for you too.b

Sadly, though, divorce cannot always be avoided or prevented. It is a reality of the modern world. Some parents learn God’s standards for marriage after they are already divorced. Still others live loyally by those standards, only to be betrayed by a selfish, immoral mate. The Bible itself acknowledges that some extreme circumstances make a divorce permissible. (Matthew 19:9) But as Jesus taught, it is impossible to make any wise decision without first ‘counting the cost.’​—Luke 14:28.

If a divorce is an accomplished fact, this is surely not the time to sink under the weight of guilt or regrets. This is the time to soften the blow for the children. It can be done! Dr. Florence Bienenfeld, a widely respected divorce counselor and mediator, assures divorced parents: “Divorce does not have to be a Greek tragedy in which everyone dies. Everyone can live, and in time recover, heal and do very well.”​—Helping Your Child Succeed After Divorce.

But how? What can parents, relatives, and friends do to help the children of divorce?

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