Children of Divorced Parents

Interesting articles on The Christian Century, February 7, 2006 (1 & 2) about children of divorced parents on Elizabeth Marquardt’s book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. This book appears more as a autobiography of the author’s life affected from her parents’ divorce.

Both articles are worth noting.

First, by Lauren Winner, who edited one of the two articles.

1. My parents divorced when I was in grammar school, and I sometimes feel I have spent my adulthood defensively living out an alternative to gloomy predictions about the myriad ways divorce harms kids. I think I turned out just fine, thank you. And if you dare suggest that I am an overachiever because I am trying to make up for something I didn’t have in childhood, I will snap your head off before you get a sentence out. Indeed, sometimes I feel so defensive about my childhood that I find myself refusing to admit that my parents’ divorce had any impact on me whatsoever.
2. …I prefer to maintain the polite fiction that all was always well, that everyone did the best he or she could…
3. I know my defenses are ridiculous and false, not to mention prideful. When I can clear my head, when it is just God and me or my journal and me, I can admit the obvious: that yes, of course, even in the most amicable divorce, even when parents don’t turn their kids into chess pieces, even when divorce does not spell economic disaster for the custodial mom, even then divorce indelibly marks children.
4. Two-thirds of people who grew up with married parents “strongly agree” that “children were at the center of my family,” whereas only one-third of people whose parents divorced say the same.
5. After living through a divorce, children are more likely to feel morally adrift, to become what Marquardt terms “moral forgers,” people who both forge their “own values and beliefs” in the “intense heat” of their inner life and are forced to cut their own path “through the forest of contradictions between parents’ ways of living.” Unlikely to receive strong moral instruction from parents—not because divorced people are immoral, but because divorced people are less likely to be able to agree upon and form their kids in a single, shared vision of the world—kids with divorced parents tend to be less religious than people who grew up with married parents. …Yet, intriguingly, if your parents are divorced you might wind up more religious than your parents, because you tend to look toward a faith tradition for moral or spiritual guidance you did not get at home.
6. …kids whose parents are divorced typically make a bigger deal out of their parents’ birthdays, especially their mothers’ birthdays, than do kids whose parents are married. That seemingly small detail is incredibly revealing—it captures the ways that children whose parents are divorced have to assume adult responsibilities, even the role of pseudospouse, with their parents. There’s something all-around sad about the picture of little Susie working hard to remember her mom’s birthday, saving her whole allowance for weeks to buy her a pair of earrings and a cupcake, and then singing solo, though with great gusto, when presenting said cupcake to mom. Susie shouldn’t have to do all this herself—dad should be there to take charge of the celebration.
7. While obviously an amicable divorce is preferable to an embittered one, even children of “good divorces” experience more stress, more loneliness and more confusion than children whose parents are married…

Secondly, from the author, Elizabeth Marquardt, herself.

1. One of the big challenges for any marriage is to bring together two worlds — two people with different backgrounds and often different values. The rubbing together of these two worlds is often not neat or pretty, but some kind of unity is established. After a divorce, the job of making sense of the two worlds and the conflicts that arise between them doesn’t go away — it gets handed from the adults to the child. The child has to negotiate by himself or herself the different beliefs and values and ways of living that the child finds in each world. And these two worlds often become more different as each year goes by and the divorced parents develop new relationships, new jobs, new interests.
2. Children who grow up traveling between two worlds feel early on the need to confront — alone — the big moral questions: What’s right and wrong? What do I believe? Where do I belong? Is there a God? What is true? They feel the need to confront these questions because they see dramatically contrasting answers in each parent’s world. In fact, they’re much more likely to see their parents as polar opposites even when they don’t fight. Any answer they glean from one world can be undermined by looking at the other.
3. Many people have noticed that children of divorce often seem independent. They tend to help around the house or travel between parents’ homes alone or take care of their younger siblings by themselves. They also have to become independent moral thinkers. Some people might say: Well, this need to be independent is a good thing. But while some children certainly can rise to the occasion, they lose their childhoods, and I think that that’s something that we should mourn, not celebrate.
4. I’m now 35. My parents split up when I was two years old.
5. …children of divorce are far less likely when they grow up to say they are very or even fairly religious. They’re far less likely to attend a house of worship frequently. There is about a 14 percent difference in this area between children of divorce and children of intact families. They’re also less likely to be a member of a house of worship or to be a leader there.…when children of divorce hear that God is like a father or a parent because God’s always there for you, they experience a disconnect. For them, parental absence is as common an experience as parental presence.The Prodigal Parent. It’s remarkable to talk to the children of divorce about the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father waits for his errant son to come home. They recognize the act of leaving home, but in their experience it was the parent who left, not the child. It was the parent who left the family… If anyone was staying home waiting for someone to return, it was the child waiting for mom and dad to come home. …This means that children of divorce see themselves in the role of God in the story.There is an interesting historical background to this issue. When the divorce revolution took off with the advent of no-fault divorce in the 1960s, experts predicted that marriages overall would be happier because all the unhappy people would get divorced. Studies have shown, however, that as the divorce rate grew, the marital happiness rate fell. As marriage became easier to get out of, the threshold of what constituted a problematic marriage was lowered. At one time, society made it too hard to get out of a horrendous marriage. But we have gone too far in the other direction…