Why Must Kid Films Demonize Divorce?

When my kids stay with me as part of their weekly custody arrangement, we usually spend Saturday mornings eating my wife's homemade pancakes and watching a movie I taped from either the High School Musical channel or the Sponge Bob channel. My nine-year-old son handles DVR remote control duties with the fluid dexterity of Liberace on the piano.

At some point during recent showings of The Shaggy Dog and The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, I picked up on two common themes:

1) The willingness of Sex and the City's Kristin Davis to play a suburban housewife under any circumstances, and

2) The leveraging a child's worst nightmare -- divorce -- for gratuitous dramatic effect.

In both kid films, the parents' marriage is in some state of jeopardy; in one, the kids perceive a role in saving it. In each case, the parents avert tragedy and ultimately fall lovingly into each other's arms. (Though Davis should consider parting with her agent).

Said a friend of mine recently, "I remember as a kid of divorce, being deeply offended by "The Parent Trap" for its premise that a marriage could be fixed just by sticking the parents in a room together!

Even in the far superior The Incredibles, Violet warns her brother Dashiell: "Mom and Dad's life could be in danger. Or worse, their marriage!"

What's the takeaway for spongy young minds other than defining divorce as a fate worse then death?

I'm all for positive nuclear family images in kid films, even the "hit-you-over-the head-with-a-mallet" kind (see: Spy Kids). What makes me uncomfortable is when divorce is superfluously depicted to kids as the end of the world. The obvious inference to real-life children of divorce (of which there are roughly one million a year):

Your family is broken. Happy ending for us; stinks to be you.

In reality, while divorce is an unfortunate outcome, these children are not necessarily wounded for life. A comprehensive 2002 study of more than 1,400 families and 2,500 children by a professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia found the negative impact of divorce on both children and parents has been "exaggerated": Roughly 20-25% of youngsters experience long-term damage after their parents break up, but the large majority end up coping comfortably.

The difference between coping with upheaval and being deeply scarred by it seems to hinge more on good parenting -- as well as what was going on before the divorce -- than on family definition.

Divorce is clearly not the psychological terminal sentence for kids it's sometimes made out to be. Knowing this, Hollywood writers looking to put their kid protagonists in jeopardy should stick to the safe slate of villains and demons, and avoid the all too easy road of demonizing divorce.

Joel Schwartzberg is an award-winning essayist from New Jersey whose first book "The 40-Year-Old Version: Humoirs of a Divorced Dad" is now available.

Comments

[a1ad]

I don't feel as if films should back away from addressing divorce in kid films. You brought up The Incredibles. For many kids, even those in stable families, the prospect of divorced parents is a scary one. Of course, Violet and Dash of the Incredibles would view divorce as being something bad. In many films, divorce is presented as being a horrible thing because simply, divorce is a secret fear of many kids. But I do think that movies should not present easy, cheesy ways to "fix" divorce; I agree that the Parents Trap is quite offensive, simply because it provides an incredibly unrealistic ending that might encourage children to develop the same mind frame--that anything can be fixed just like that.

[adoantarel]

How about Mrs. Doubtfire? In that one, the parents remain divorced but the ending is a happy one.

[yellowdoggie]

Personally, I wish that "family films" would never have the plot device of a dying dog. I think that's much sadder than divorce.

[BlackJAC]

Roger Ebert called it "Divine Dog Syndrome" in his Little Movie Glossary: other civilizations will infer that we deified dogs in the same way the ancient Egyptians deified cats because our movies show humans being killed by the cityload but dogs are spared at every opportunity (e.g. INDEPENDENCE DAY).

[BlackJAC]

Perhaps it has to do with how in some really messy divorce cases, the kids are caught in the crossfire of bickering parents who wish to use custody as a pawn against each other.

[LeftRight]

I seem to have turned out okay after my parent's divorce. My older brother took a bit longer, but he was messed up before the divorce.

My step children seem to have worked out okay too. Course I think that the important thing in BOTH cases was the fact that in the case of my parents NEITHER of them ever said anything bad about the other, and neither tried to keep me from the other. Same holds true for my stepkids! When the youngest wanted to go back and live with his dad, we told him that we would miss him and his bedroom would stay his, but that it was okay..... Still talk to him pretty much every night, too!