How Americans Became Convinced Divorce Is Bad for Kids

[marmar]

How Americans Became Convinced Divorce Is Bad for Kids

BY GAIL CORNWALL AND SCOTT COLTRANE
JULY 11, 20225:55 AM


(Slate) Many Americans think it’s a shame that only 70 percent of children in the U.S. live in one home with two parents and under 50 percent live with two biological, married parents. They see divorce and single parenthood as normal yet still unfortunate, since accepted wisdom says children suffer long-term, irreparable harm when their parents live separately. On social media, that looks like everything from an Isla Fisher meme with the quote “You can’t underestimate how traumatic divorce is for the children,” to Catholic influencer Leila Miller writing “Divorce is simply a bloodless form of child sacrifice.”

But a careful review of academic research—and the historical and cultural context in which it was conducted—calls this shared understanding into question. Most of the problems associated with being a child of divorce are instead related to sexism, racism, homophobia, shoddy recordkeeping, and insufficient government support.

Divorce was rare before the American Revolution. For those who were not enslaved, about one-third of children lived with a stepparent or single parent. But that owed to mortality rates; marriages just weren’t often dissolved. When they were, rights to the children belonged to their father. In the business section, next to ads for horse rentals, colonial newspapers published “runaway wife” reports. Illustrating just how commercial an undertaking marriage was in early white America, these husbands didn’t plead for their erstwhile partners’ return; they just declared themselves off the hook for debts the women incurred. But after America divorced King George III, attitudes toward personal independence and contractual obedience shifted. By the 19th century, suffragists argued that not only would an expanded right to exit marriage permit women to escape bad ones, but the threat of separation would allow them to renegotiate the terms of good ones. Men also increasingly felt entitled to love matches and fulfillment. Around the time frontier mentality took hold, runaway husband ads became more common than runaway wife ones. The “tender years” doctrine assumed children needed to be with their mothers, reversing the custodial default. By 1970, California had authorized no-fault divorce, and most states followed suit within a decade.

This liberalization of divorce during the second half of the 20th century occurred against a backdrop of increasing female employment and independence. In the attendant cultural battle, some people directly defended patriarchal gender roles ordained by nature and God. But many instead made children their rallying call. The 1965 Moynihan Report—a document written by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan and his staff to convince the federal government to bolster civil rights legislation with policies addressing economic inequality—decried the “crumbling” of family structure in Black communities. Divorce rates, which were even across race until 1960, had indeed risen more steeply and earlier among Black women. But the report’s emphasis on family structure gave conservatives an excuse to ignore the structural forces behind that stat and insist on self-help rather than actual help. On the campaign trail in 1976, Ronald Reagan held up the straw man of the “welfare queen,” a Black single mother gaming the system. This was the sexist, racist narrative of the declining family that the conservative “family values” movement of the 1990s and 2000s carried forward. Pro-marriage PR campaigns—run by organizations like the Institute for American Values and the Promise Keepers—were also deeply homophobic. They promoted heterosexual marriage with funding from conservative groups like the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation. (This connection continues: Leila Miller wrote an April 2022 article titled “The Ten Sins of Gay Surrogacy.”)

....(snip)....

In a 2003 paper, Paul Amato of Penn State created an index of overall psychological well-being and concluded that the overlap between adults with and without divorced parents was 90 percent, meaning only about 10 percent of those with divorced parents had more mental health issues and reported lower life satisfaction and happiness than those with married ones. Almost half, 42 percent, exceeded the average well-being score of the married parents sample.

....(snip)....

It’s also possible even the small negative effect that’s seen along with divorce isn’t caused by divorce. Texan kids who live in homes with pools go to college at higher rates, but it’s not because swimming makes them smarter; their parents’ wealth independently drives both phenomena. Similarly, children whose parents divorce are more likely to have lived in a high-conflict home prior to the breakup. If a child ends up struggling with, say, substance use, the stress of that conflict would be behind it, not the divorce. In support of this theory, a 1999 study found that children whose high-conflict parents don’t split experience even greater behavioral problems, and a 2004 paper showed positive effects of ending high-conflict marriages. A 2014 study found no effect of family structure on psychopathology after controlling for conflict. ...........(more)

https://slate.com/technology/2022/07/divorce-bad-for-kids-history.html

[niyad]

1. KNR and thank you.

[shrike3]

2. My parents' marriage was infinitely more stressful than their divorce. n/t

[Skittles]

3. that is true of so many marriages

the thing about kids is, they are much more intuitive and stronger than people realize

it's not really a divorce that harms them, it's how the parents handle it

NEVER hate your ex more than you love your kids!!!

[róisín_dubh]

5. I wish.

Though I imagine it would’ve become more stressful, my parents still despise each other (actually I’m not sure my dad cares that much). Their divorce was horrendous and had awful implications for mine and my sisters’ futures, sadly. I’m an anxious wreck who would work herself to death rather than fail, my middle sister is just a mess. My youngest sister seems to have it together.

[Mosby]

4. Single-Parent Families and Adolescent Crime...

Original Article

Open Access

Published: 17 January 2022
Single-Parent Families and Adolescent Crime: Unpacking the Role of Parental Separation, Parental Decease, and Being Born to a Single-Parent Family

Addressing a gap in the extant literature on single-parent families and juvenile delinquency, we distinguish between different types of single-parent families. Using Dutch population register data on nearly 1.3 million children, we performed logistic regressions to assess the relation between growing up in a single-parent family before age 12 and the likelihood to engage in juvenile delinquency during adolescence. Our findings suggest that the likelihood of juvenile delinquency increases (1) when children are born to a single parent, followed by children with separated parents and children experiencing parental death, compared to children growing up with both biological parents; (2) when the single-parent family started at a younger age; and (3) when children grow up with only a biological mother, for both sons and daughters, compared to only a biological father. The relationship between growing up in single-parent families and juvenile delinquency is much more complex than often assumed. Future research should pay more attention to diversity in the composition of single-parent families.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40865-021-00183-7