DIVORCE IS in the news again–and not just because of Michael Jordan’s marital woes. In the past two weeks, both USA Today and the Washington Post have run fawning profiles of E. Mavis Hetherington, one of the nation’s leading divorce researchers. Hetherington, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, has just published a new book-length study, “For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered,” which presents the results of her three decades of research on the effects of divorce.
Both articles portray Hetherington as a counterbalance to the more pessimistic Judith S. Wallerstein, a retired lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. According to Wallerstein–whose 2000 book, “The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce,” incited the last flurry of press coverage on the topic–divorce may be beneficial for the adults involved, but it has long-term consequences for children as they become adults, putting them at greater risk for substance abuse, emotional problems, having children out of wedlock, and seeing their own marriages end in divorce. Wallerstein’s work helped end the old consensus that divorce was no big deal for the kids involved, and has provided much ammunition for cultural conservatives seeking to strengthen marriage and reduce the divorce rate (which, coincidentally, dropped slightly in the 1990s from a high of over 50 percent to about 43 percent currently).
