DADI.org

by Maggie Gallagher

There are two divorce wars now going on: the angry ones in court and the usually more cerebral contest within the nation's cultural elite. Does divorce matter, and if so, how much?

In the latter debate, Judith Wallerstein, a clinical research psychologist, has been one of the most influential voices. Her long-term study of middle-class children sparked a re-evaluation of the rosy view of divorce.

Before Judy, people said things such as, "If you want a divorce, don't worry. Kids are resilient." As Dr. Richard A. Gardner summed up the pathetic range of professional opinion in his 1982 manual: "There are those who recommend that parents not consider the divorce's effects on the children in making their decision. ... My own belief is that the effects on the children should be one of the considerations, albeit minor."

After Judy, even psychologists recognized what should have been (but wasn't) obvious: Except in violent marriages, children suffer when their parents part. For some, the trauma never ends. Parents thus have an obligation to recognize the pain they will cause their children by divorce, to avoid it if possible, and to take every step to minimize it afterward.

Dr. Wallerstein's clinical work has been increasingly backed by large national studies that confirm the damage divorce can cause. As one mental health analysis reported in the April 1998 issue of American Sociological Review, "(A) parental divorce during childhood or adolescence continues to have a negative effect when a person is in his or her 20s and early 30s."

So imagine Wallerstein's surprise when she woke up Saturday morning to find the lead author of the above-mentioned study, Andrew Cherlin, personally attacking her in a speech before the American Population Association, which was reprinted in The New York Times.

"Too often," Professor Cherlin muses, "these public discussions are played out in a troubling pattern in which one extreme position is debated relative to the opposite extreme," a pattern which "impedes our understanding of social problems." But one thing's for certain: "We know enough to clearly reject Ms. Wallerstein's extreme view: that family structure is the cause of all the problems we see in children who don't live with two biological parents."

Both the tone and the substance of this attack are curious. As it happens, this is not Judith Wallerstein's view, or the view of any other divorce critic that I know. Of course, she recognizes that many things -- poverty, conflict, neglect, abuse -- are harmful to children. Nor is Wallerstein interested in structure per se, but in how "structure" influences the family process. "I've never talked about family structure; I've talked about the fact that over the years the post-divorced family is less nurturing and less protective than a reasonably well-functioning intact family," Wallerstein explains.

Cherlin correctly points out the limits of the methods of clinical researchers like Wallerstein. Without confirmation from less in-depth but larger national studies, you can't be sure that these results aren't anomalies. But Wallerstein has some interesting things to say about the limits of sociologists such as Cherlin: "They work from symptom lists. What they don't look at at all is the child's suffering, that doesn't show up on a symptom list." In other words, if a child of divorce is tormented by fears of abandonment, but holds up his grades and doesn't commit crimes, a sociologist like Cherlin literally can't see that any harm at all has been done.

Cherlin is one of the nation's leading family scholars. He's entitled to his views. But he surely is not entitled to misrepresent Wallerstein's views, nor to abuse her as an "extremist" for the self-serving purpose of promoting -- well, she puts it better than I could -- "the notion that he is walking in the harmonious Grecian middle and everyone else is walking in the middle ages of extremism. That is a kind of arrogance and foolishness that doesn't advance knowledge."

Amen.

(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at GallagherIAV@Yahoo.com.)

COPYRIGHT 1999 MAGGIE GALLAGHER

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