The fortieth anniversary of that much-maligned institution, the no-fault divorce, has just passed. This seems an appropriate time to reevaluate the impact of divorce on children. After an early wave of alarmist reactions, in 1991 two leading social scientists, Dr. Paul Amato and Dr. Bruce Keith, took a closer look at the results of 92 earlier studies which had found that divorce was damaging to children. After carefully examining the data, Amato and Keith were astonished to discover that the original researchers had reached the wrong conclusions in their work -- not by a matter of percentage points, but entirely. It was not divorce at all that was most closely linked to children having problems; instead, it was a history of family conflict. Numerous other researchers have since concurred, such as Robert Emery of the University of Virginia and Rex Forehand of the University of Georgia, who wrote: "Study after study shows that divorce and remarriage do not harm children - parental conflict does." Unfortunately, this news has not yet reached the popular imagination.
Furthermore, longitudinal studies of children from divorced families, such as the thirty-year-long one by E. Mavis Hetherington, shows that on all meaningful measures of success -- social, economic, intellectual and psychological -- most adult children from divorced families are no worse off than their peers whose parents remained married. She tells us: "most of the young men and women from my divorced families looked a lot like their contemporaries from non-divorced homes. Although they looked back on their parents' breakup as a painful experience, most were successfully going about the chief tasks of young adulthood: establishing careers, creating intimate relationships, building meaningful lives for themselves."
Since we now know that it is family conflict, and not divorce that harms children, it is time to adapt family law to reflect this reality. The adversarial system that currently applies in custody disagreements increases family conflict which stands in direct opposition to what we know to be in the best interests of children. My article in today's New York Times discusses these ideas and suggestions for new family law legislation in more depth.
The link to the article may be found here. Let me know what you think.
