The Statistics are Staggering: The Impact of Divorce in Society

The Statistics are Staggering:

Stepfamilies are not addressed, assessed and counted---further catapulting those who live in and lead our society into the quagmire of ignorance. The numbers tell the story: The US Bureau of Census relates:

* 1300 new stepfamilies are forming every day.
* Over 50% of US families are remarried or re-coupled.
* The average marriage in America lasts only seven years.
* One out of two marriages ends in divorce.
* 75% remarry
* 66% of those living together or remarried break up, when children are involved.
* 80% of remarried, or re-coupled, partners with children both have careers.
* 50% of the 60 million children under the age of 13 are currently living with one biological parent and that parent's current partner.
* The 1990 US Census stated there will be more stepfamilies than original families by the year 2000
* The 2000 US Census did not mention stepfamilies. According to the Stepfamily Foundation's estimates more than 50% of divorced fathers children visit their children. These children do not legally "reside" with their fathers. So, neither government nor academic research include these fathers and their children as stepfamilies. They are completely ignored and uncounted. Thus, boosting the numbers to well over 50% of US families. o 2 out 3 marriages under taking place under 30 years of age end in divorce.(US Census)
* 75% complain of "not having access to resources as a stepfamily," according to a recent Stepfamily Foundation survey of 2000 web questionnaires.
* It is generally considered by researchers that couples today have a deficit of skills with which to make partnerships last. Explanations abound.
* 80% of married women have careers and women are less dependent on the support of the male partner.
* Over 80% of women who enter into stepfamilies are career women. These women do not have to endure the unexpected rigors of remarriage.
* Men who choose to end a marriage also know that career women cost less to divorce.
* A Boston University psychologist researcher reported that of the career women who had married men with children over 75% said that, "if they had do it again they would NOT marry a man with children."
* 50% of all women, not just mothers, are likely to live in a stepfamily relationship, when we include living-together families in our definition of the stepfamily." states Professor of Sociology Larry L. Bumpass of the University of Wisconsin.

What does this all mean?

It means that most children today live in step relationships, of which two out of three are predicted to fail. This family failure causes the child to lack the crucial support that enables him to thrive or even survive society's cultural, educational, and work systems.

With more than 1 million children yearly experiencing the divorce of their parents, the futures of these youngsters are of great concern. Divorcing parents are confused by conflicting experts. Their research and studies find different issues about what to expect for their children. The most prominent expert is Judith Wallerstein. Her results closely
coincide with our research since 1976. Wallerstein is a psychologist and author of SECOND CHANCES,1989, Tickor &Fields, NY, NY and THE UNEXPECTED LEGACY OF DIVORCE: A 25-Year Landmark Study, 2000, Hyperion, NY, NY which followed 93 now-adult children for about 25 years on the affects from their parent's divorce.

Wallerstein reports that:

* Only 45 percent of children "do well" after divorce.
* 41% are doing poorly, worried, underachieving, deprecating, and often angry."
* Fifty percent of the women and 30 percent of the men were still intensely angry with their former spouses.
* "Most felt the lack of a template, a working model, for a loving relationship between a man and a woman."
* Divorced parents provide less time, less discipline, and are less sensitive to the children as they are caught up in their own divorce and its aftermath.
* Many parents are unable to separate their needs from the children's needs and often share too much of their personal life with their children, placing the children in a precarious emotional state, vulnerable to grandiosity or to depression within what is left of their families.
* The majority of parents of divorce are chronically disorganized and unable to parent effectively.
* As diminished parenting continues, it permanently disrupts the child's once normal emotional growth and functioning.

The good news, according to the study:

* "The children of divorce tended to do well if mothers and father, regardless of remarriage, resumed parenting roles, putting differences aside, and allowing the children continuing relationships with both parents.
* Only a few children had these advantages."

On the other hand:
E. Mavis Hetherington, a developmental psychologist, has researched 1,400 families, some for three decades, involving about 2,500 children. While some of her findings in For Better or for Worse, Divorce Reconsidered are disturbing, she believes the negative effects of divorce are exaggerated while the positive effects are ignored. She finds:

1. Most children are doing reasonably well within two years of the divorce.
2. About 25% of youths from divorced families have serious social or emotional problems; 10% from intact families do.
3. Most young adults from divorce are establishing careers, creating intimate relationships and building meaningful lives.
4. Young women do better than young men, often becoming more competent than if they had stayed in unhappy family situations; some thrive.
5. Seventy percent of adult children of divorce say divorce is an acceptable solution to an unhappy marriage, even with children; 40% from non-divorced families agree.

The 2004 researcher with bad news for divorcing parents is Elizabeth Marquardt, a scholar with the Institute for American Values, a think tank on family issues. Her study, shows children often grow up torn between two households. Growing bodies of research are emerging on at least two sides of the debate on the effects of divorce. Marquardt is among those who believe that even under the best of circumstances, children often suffer emotional scars that last a lifetime and have trouble with their own intimate relationships as adults.

Marquardt hates the term "the good divorce." "Just because parents don't continue to argue doesn't mean the kids do well," she says. The good divorce, Marquardt says, is an "adult-centered vision. ...No matter what the level of conflict, a divided family often requires children to confront a whole set of challenges that children in married-parent, intact families do not have to face."

Her major conclusion is that children whose parents divorce must go from living in one world that seemed safe to going back and forth between two homes that often feel like "polar opposites." The kids must do what their parents had always done for them: develop a clear view of what to think, what to believe and how to behave, especially in the moral and spiritual realms. "It becomes the child's job to synthesize these two worlds."

Marquardt conducted a national survey of 1,500 young adults, now 18 to 35. About half are from divorced families and half from intact families. Those from divorced families were younger than 14 when the split occurred. She also interviewed 71 young adults to probe their "inner feelings." She says children of divorced parents are more apt than those living in intact families to feel divided between two homes with different values. They are asked to keep secrets about the different households. They are left without clear guidance on what is right and what is wrong, turning instead to friends and siblings. And they are "more apt to struggle with loss, isolation, loneliness and suffering."

Marquardt has the support of psychologist Judith Wallerstein, whose controversial Second Chances in 1989 started a firestorm of debate. Wallerstein found that many adult children had never gotten over the often "cataclysmic" changes divorce brings throughout a child's lifetime. While divorce is seen as a second chance at happiness for a parent, a child does not see it that way.

Wallerstein applauds Marquardt. "Her observations are right on target," Wallerstein says. "These children have a sense of living in two different worlds. They grow up with a difficulty in feeling whole."