This story told by first-time author Elizabeth Marquardt could easily have succumbed to the maudlin, just one more Gen-Xer telling her sad, but not especially tragic life history.  What saves this book, and turns it into a remarkably fresh, cogent, and compelling testimony is the bonding of the author’s personal story to solid and original social research.  Marquardt shows “just how radical divorce really is,” how it “powerfully changes the structure of childhood itself,” how growing up in a divorced family “is like growing up in a different culture.”  Indeed, in the wake of the no-fault divorce revolution of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, one-quarter of all American young adults are the children of divorce.  For the first time, she gives these hitherto silent millions a public voice. 

Divorce has long been linked among affected children to significantly higher rates of school dropout, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, poor health, suicide attempts, and depression.  Child abuse also thrives on divorce; research shows having a stepparent in a child’s home “to be the most powerful predictor of severe child abuse.”  However, Marquardt gives relatively little attention to these serious pathologies.  Instead, her focus is on the seemingly successful children of “good divorces.”  These are cases where parental conflicts over the children were minimal, where both parents stayed actively involved in their children’s lives, and where the children went on to college.  Alongside her own experience, she builds her argument on in-person interviews with 71 young adults (ages 18 to 35), half of whom grew up in divorced families and half in intact homes.  She adds to this the results of a telephone survey (developed in cooperation with noted sociologist Norval Glenn) of another 1500 young adults, divided in similar fashion.

Marquardt’s findings are persuasive, and disturbing.  She blows the myth of the “good divorce” out of the water, labeling as “lies” the prevailing arguments that children are resilient and do just fine in a “low conflict” divorce or even thrive in the pleasant diversity of “blended families.”  She shows that the children of “good” divorces “typically experience painful loses, moral confusion, spiritual suffering, [and] strained relationships.”  “Happy talk” about divorce, exemplified by Constance Ahrons’ 1994 book The Good Divorce, exists to soothe adult consciences, from therapists, lawyers, and judges to the divorcing parents themselves.  For the children, there is commonly pain and a deafening cultural silence.

The author’s central argument is that divorce makes impossible a primary parental task.  Married parents build a morally coherent and stable home through thousands of little negotiations and compromises between themselves, which smoothe the way for their offspring and allow them to have a childhood.  In the divorced family, however, parents abandon this work.  They may not be in open conflict, but they are also “no longer trying to make sense of the differences between their two different worlds.”  This task falls instead on their children.  The result, Marquardt shows, is a permanent inner-conflict over their parents’ separate lives: “children become travelers between two worlds,” never feeling truly at home in either, at once outsiders and insiders in “shadow homes” lacking “elemental wholeness.”  Adult vulnerabilities are now exposed; the children of divorce must grow up quickly, in some cases even taking on the role of the adult in a broken home.  Other results for children include a heightened sense of being “not safe,” the keeping of secrets from each parent, pervasive loneliness, a feeling of loss, and a premature need to forge one’s own morality.

The pervasive disorientation facing the children of divorce is revealed with particular poignancy when they confront the Gospel parable of the Prodigal Son.  In Marquardt’s interviews with those who grew up in intact homes, the focus is on the end of the story when, despite all his mistakes, the son wins his father’s love.  Among young adults from divorced families, however, attention focuses on the beginning, but with the roles reversed: “the story is not about the prodigal son but the prodigal parents.”  As one interviewee put it, “In my life people have either gone away and done something else or gone away and stayed away.”  As another related: “My family didn’t even give me anything to reject!  There wasn’t a stable enough thing to go away from or come back to.”  Marquardt’s surveys show that the children of divorce struggle deeply with other religious ideas, too, such as the commandment, “Honor your father and mother,” and the concept of God the Father.

The book only loses momentum when it turns to recommendations for making things better.  From beginning to end, Marquardt insists that she is not anti-divorce.  As a typical statement explains: “Divorce is a vital option for ending very bad marriages.”  She rejects the most recent innovation in divorce law regarding children—the presumption of joint custody—as “extremely disturbing,” an option that “burdens children even more than other types of arrangements.”  Her alternative is to continue giving judges and parents “wide discretion” on custody arrangements, which promises little improvement.  In the end, her agenda for change becomes a call for more “mothers and fathers, living together, married to each other, preferably getting along well” and, if they do break up, honest public recognition of the “loss” facing their children.

This tepid response is unfortunate.  To begin with, the author underestimates the degree to which divorce has become an industry, driven by lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and others with large financial interests in broken homes.  Moreover, the law has much more potential to serve marriage and children than she admits.  Over 200 years ago, the French statesmen Louis deBonald authored the treatise, On Divorce, which argued against the “no fault” statute of his day.  He noted that the state “intervenes in the spouse’s contract of union because it represents the unborn child…and because it accepts the commitment made by the spouses…under its guarantee to bring that child into being.”  Bonald adds that civil marriage

…is truly a contract between three persons,

two of whom are present, one of whom

(the [potential] child) is absent, but is represented

by public power, guarantor of the commitment

made by the two spouses to form a society.

American law now fails to protect that all-important little society, and so fails the children of divorce.  One clear solution is to strengthen the law.  The pre-1968 system requiring the finding of “fault” had the virtue of underscoring the public interest in the preservation of marriage.  As Marquardt so ably shows, the “no fault” revolution can be declared a failure.  Other research has shown that the introduction of “no fault” actually produced more divorces than would otherwise have occurred and has failed to reduce conflict, only shifting its focus.  The implication is that we should undo the “revolution,” making divorce more difficult and (at least when children are present) treating it once again as an indirect crime against the social order.  We should do this for the sake of parents, who will gain incentives to carry them over the rough spots and to repair rather than discard their marriages; and most certainly for the sake of the children.