The Facts of Married Life

Valerie H. Colb, co-author of the tellingly entitled The Smart Divorce, for instance, sneers at Wallerstein’s latest book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study, as “purportedly definitive.” Divorce lawyer Raoul Felder calls her a “pseudo-scientist.” Columnist Katha Pollitt darkly suggests that the children of divorce whom Wallerstein has interviewed over the past quarter-century are lying to her about their anxiety and pain. Howard Markman, a psychologist and marriage researcher at the University of Denver, insists she ignores evidence that contradicts her view about the suffering divorce inflicts on children. Even New Republic senior editor Margaret Talbot, an admirer of Wallerstein, delicately skips over her newest and boldest finding — that staying together in a loveless marriage really is good for the kids — while lauding her new study of the destructive impact of divorce on children in the New York Times Book Review.

Why is Wallerstein such an enormous threat? Because she and a handful of other researchers, including Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, are beginning to change the way America sees divorce. For now, Wallerstein’s influence has been on elite opinion, but mass opinion may follow. Her findings were a cover story in Time last month, and she’s been treated respectfully — and sometimes reverently — in recent television appearances. An excerpt from The Case for Marriage, in which Waite and Gallagher strongly endorse Wallerstein’s qualms about divorce, appeared in Talk.

Wallerstein challenges the view, dominant since the 1960s, that if parents divorce amicably, the worst their children will suffer is temporary disruption in their lives: The long-term adverse impact will be nil. Since lawyers and counselors and academics created this benign take on divorce in the first place, they have a vested interest in preserving it — which makes Wallerstein their worst nightmare. She is destroying their baby.

In her first book on the children of divorce, Second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade After Divorce, published in 1989, she deconstructed the myth of the happy divorce. Parents who separate may thrive, but their kids face painful consequences that last well into middle age. Now, in The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, she makes a compelling case for keeping a marriage intact for the sake of the children (absent violent conflict, of course). A bad marriage, it turns out, is better than a good divorce as far as the health and welfare of kids are concerned.

Wallerstein is a difficult target to attack for several reasons. She’s not a fly-by-night writer, but a researcher with reams of empirical evidence to back up her conclusions. She has interviewed more children of divorce — many thousands, in fact — over a longer period of time than any of her critics have. She has academic credentials, having lectured for years at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. And she’s neither a conservative nor a religious foe of divorce. Wallerstein, now seventy-eight years old, is a social scientist with a heart, caring deeply about the children she’s come to know and keeping in regular contact with many of them. Most important of all, she courageously and honestly reports what she finds, though it hardly makes her a heroine in the liberal, permissive culture of Marin County (across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco), where she lives and has conducted her studies. She’s discovered that the effect of divorce on children is far worse than anyone suspected, and she hasn’t flinched from saying so.

Married for fifty-three years and the mother of three, Wallerstein began studying kids from recently separated or divorced parents in 1971. She started with 131 children from sixty families, intensively interviewing each child, fifty-nine mothers, and forty-seven fathers weeks after the breakup, then following up after eighteen months, five years, and ten years. At fifteen years, she interviewed many in the original group and contacted them again after twenty-five years. Each time, she heard tales of the unmitigated agony of divorce for kids. But she wasn’t able to confirm the folk wisdom that kids fare better if their parents stick with an unhappy marriage. For that task, she needed a comparison group, and for The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce she organized and interviewed such a group: twenty-eight adult women and sixteen men.

Exploding the myth that a bad marriage automatically harms children, Wallerstein offers unequivocal advice to parents thinking about divorce: “I think you should seriously consider staying together for the sake of your children.” The couples in her study who stayed married “struggled with all the problems that beset modern marriage — infidelity, depression, sexual boredom, loneliness, rejection.” But so long as they maintained “their loving, shared parenting without feeling martyred,” as many did, their children didn’t suffer, Wallerstein says. It’s not true that the hallmark of most unhappy marriages is open conflict, she points out. “That children are aware of their parents’ unhappiness and are themselves unhappy because of it is also not true.” For kids, divorce is not the solution to a troubled marriage. Rather, it is the “root cause of the trouble” that follows in their lives and shapes their destinies, Wallerstein says.

To her surprise, Wallerstein found scads of striking differences between children reared by unhappily married parents and those whose parents divorced. Getting married was a problem for the children of divorce. Many in her study (40 percent, to be exact) have never married. Others acted rashly and made bad choices, picking spouses in a “forlorn, haphazard way,” frequently choosing lovers with serious problems, and often winding up with failed marriages. But “people raised in good-enough, intact families, who feel loved by their parents” didn’t settle for whatever fell in their path. With the picture of a working (even if unhappy) marriage, they had the confidence to wait for a suitable mate. They felt part of a larger family, and they were comfortable having children. For grownup children of divorce, “the lack of observations and memories of a working marriage is a serious handicap,” Wallerstein says. “It’s like becoming a dancer without having seen a dance.”

With data and riveting case histories, Wallerstein bashes what she calls “the beguiling myth of divorce” in America. The idea that divorce may be beneficial for children is but a small part of this myth. All along, children have known better, she says. If they could vote, “almost all would vote to maintain their parents’ marriage.” Long after the divorce — and even long after their parents have remarried other partners — they pine for their parents to reunite.

Among the myths that Wallerstein refutes is that divorce merely leaves children in a truncated version of a two-parent family: “It is a different kind of family, in which children feel less protected and less certain about their future than children in reasonably good intact families.” Their parents are less attentive and more unstable and volatile. Wallerstein debunks the notion that divorce spares children years of parental conflict. “Divorce does not rescue children from chaotic families when the adults are unable and unwilling to change their lifestyles,” she says. And often, those parents are not willing to change. If they were, they probably would not have divorced.

Then there’s the myth of “parallel parenting.” This is the euphemism used by divorce mediators to pretend that two parents raising a child separately are the equivalent of two parents together. It’s a “great slogan,” like “quality time,” Wallerstein says, “but it can’t replicate the cooperative parenting that children and parents need.” Another myth is that a good remarriage will help children recover from divorce. The children she’s studied, however, were not aided in overcoming the trauma of divorce by their parents’ happy remarriages to new spouses. “I finally realized,” she confesses, “that, for most of these children, stepparents remained secondary figures compared to their attachment to their biological parents.”

Finally, Wallerstein rebuts the idea that children whose dissatisfied parents often argue and criticize each other would do better if they divorced. Here, she makes an important distinction about the value of intact families. Disagreements are normal in an intact family, “but the structure of the marriage itself contains them and makes them safe,” she says. Arguments end, and children learn how disputes “can be resolved without threatening the integrity of the family.” In cases of divorce, though, fighting “has a fundamentally different quality.” It’s both normal and inevitable, and squabbles are often unbridled and enduring.

What lifts Wallerstein’s book above dry sociology are the wrenching life stories she recounts of children of divorce. Many lead lives of despair. But even those who ultimately find some happiness and success pass through years of difficulty and dysfunction. Wallerstein was the first to discover the “sleeper effect” under which kids who seem to be doing well through their adolescence falter as adults. “Contrary to what we have long thought,” she writes, “the major impact of divorce” rises in adulthood along with the prospects for romance and marriage. “When it becomes time to choose a life mate and build a new family, the effects of divorce crescendo.” Wallerstein cites a woman named Lisa as “my best case.” Lisa has a successful career, but she’s spent years “entangled with losers,” as she put it, and feels numb while having sex. She now lives with a man she doesn’t love and doesn’t intend to marry.

Critics of Wallerstein offer two major complaints — and they’re both specious. The first is that participants in her study are unrepresentative because they come from an affluent, upper-middle-class enclave. And the second is that her participants have typically sought counseling while going through divorce. But what follows from these complaints is that Wallerstein’s sample consists of children who have advantages in facing divorce. They have far fewer economic problems, which often exacerbate the deprivation and uprootedness associated with divorce, and their parents are concerned enough to have sought outside help in coping with divorce. The kids in Wallerstein’s studies have probably been treated as kindly by divorce as any can be — and for most other children, it is far worse.

Linda Waite and Maggie Gallagher, in their new The Case for Marriage: Why Married People Are Happier, Healthier and Better Off Financially, have attracted still stronger criticism, perhaps because they argue even more strenuously than Wallerstein in favor of getting married and staying married. Waite, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago, and Gallagher, who runs the Marriage Project at the Institute for American Values and writes a syndicated column, make their case in politically incorrect terms bound to infuriate feminists. But they make it effectively — and readably. And while they lack the vivid personal case studies that Wallerstein has accumulated, they have plenty of large-scale studies from all over the world — the work of professional demographers, not pro-marriage activists — to rely on in documenting the benefits of marriage.

What has riled critics the most is not their impressive array of evidence that marriage is good for one’s health, longevity, pocketbook, career success, and sex life. It’s their withering attack on cohabitation that draws the most fire. Roughly four million couples now live together outside wedlock, and Waite and Gallagher contend they suffer from cramped horizons and weak commitment to their partners. By insisting on freedom, they pay a price that many of them and their defenders don’t want to hear about. They don’t “reap the advantages of a deeper partnership,” including the “profound physical-health benefits married couples get,” according to The Case For Marriage. And because of minimal commitment, they can’t plan for the long haul or guarantee to stick together in illness or unemployment. Worse, they have less chance of a successful marriage later.

So why the furor by the pro-divorce crowd? I think they see dangerous intellectual inroads being made — mostly by the toughest people for them to combat: liberal women. There was The Divorce Culture by Barbara Dafoe Whitehead two years ago, and now these two books. In Slate, Katha Pollitt includes Whitehead among conservative “family values ideologues,” where Whitehead doesn’t belong, and she fulminates that Wallerstein, Waite, and Gallagher are guilty of “propaganda, publicity, pop-psychology, and politics.” Such rage could only be prompted by fear of losing.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.