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24 Child. Legal Rts. J. 48 (2004)
What Grown Children Say about Their Parents' Divorce

handle is hein.journals/clrj24 and id is 194 raw text is: What Grown Children Say About Their Parents' Divorce* by Constance Ahrons, Ph.D.* Studying the long-term impact of divorce on children for over twenty years of their lives is like looking through a kaleidoscope and trying to identify how all the colorful and irregular shards of glass come together to form a whole. Just take a minute to think about the things that happened in your life over a twenty year span, say age ten to age thirty. When I think about that time frame in my own life, I remember a geographical move at age ten that led to a change in school and friends and increased distance from extended family. A few years later, there was my mother's illness. Then, at age seventeen I went off to college and at age nineteen I married. Within four years, I had two children, another major geographical move followed by a divorce a year later, followed a couple of years later by my father's serious illness. All of these major life changes were stressful and had an impact on me. Although I can remember some of the feelings I experienced during all of these changes, how can I possibly assess their cumulative effects on me? Now let us add a parental divorce to this picture. Had my parents divorced when I was ten, other major transitions would have been set in motion. I would have experienced a major change in my family environment, which might have been for the better or it could have been for the worse. I would probably have seen my father less frequently. I might have experienced additional moves, changes in school, changes in economic circumstances, my parents' dating. Perhaps I would have dealt with my parents remarrying, giving me stepparents and probably step-siblings, maybe even half siblings and a range of step relatives. And all of these changes and additions might have been for the better or worse. In addition, had my parents divorced when I was ten, it might have impacted my older brother quite differently-not only because of gender, but also because of his age, birth order, temperament, and the type of relationships we each had with our parents, grandparents, and peers. Given the endless possibilities of life experiences and changes that any of us can experience over the course of twenty years, it is no wonder that the findings about divorce and its effects are contradictory and inconsistent. Now add the fact that divorce is a highly charged emotional issue about which people hold deeply entrenched values, beliefs, stereotypes and opinions, and the picture becomes even more fuzzy. When it comes to issues about divorce, the personal becomes the political. This makes it impossible to objectively look at how children are emotionally affected by a parental divorce without having it translated into the effects of divorce on society. In the past year alone, every major newspaper has run articles bemoaning the high divorce rates, blaming divorce for the demise of the American family, and dooming children to lifelong problems. The media is a powerful tool in defining how we view social issues. Unfortunately, the media leans toward short sound bite answers even to the most complex social questions. These sound bites become polarized and divorce is deemed good or bad; children are either doomed or saved. One day we hear divorce dooms children to lifelong problems; the next day we hear children are doing well. These extreme positions of divorce as disaster and divorce as inconsequential oversimplify the realities of our complex lives. A clear example of how oversimplifying research data can distort occurred when the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story in 1989 titled Children After Divorce.' It created a wave of panic in divorced parents and their children. Judith Wallerstein and her coauthor, Sandra Blakeslee, noted their newest unexpected finding, calling it the sleeper effect.2 They concluded that only ten years after divorce did it become apparent that girls experience serious effects of divorce at the time they are entering adulthood.3 When one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world highlights the findings of a study, most readers take it seriously. The finding that sixty-six percent of young women in the study Children's Legal Rights Journal