Divorce and RemarriageWallerstein and her colleagues
(Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 2003; Wallerstein
& Lewis, 2004), experienced something
similar. Wallerstein and her colleagues
began a study of 60 families with 131
children in the early 1970s. As she
followed these families, she expected the
children to feel a sense of relief at the
marital separation in direct proportion to
the amount of previous marital discord.
This was not the case. After over a quarter
of a century of following these families,
she shocked the research community with
her findings. Wallerstein and colleagues
concluded that the emotional impact of
divorce for children is cumulative,
beginning with the parental separation
and increasing over time and extending
throughout adulthood. Adult children of
divorce (adults whose parents divorced
while they were young) essentially view
life differently from their peers who have
been raised in intact homes. Divorce
affects the personalities of these adult
children in their ability to trust, their
expectations about relationships, and their
ability to cope with change (Wallerstein &
Blakelee, 2003; Wallerstein & Lewis, 2004).
Wallerstein and her colleagues’ research
has been criticized because of its small,
biased sample of only 60 families and no
control group; it did, however, follow the
same families over time.Divorce: The Other Side of the
StoryNot all researchers agree on the
negative effects of divorce. Amato suggests
that most children from divorced families
do not experience the level of clinicalSome research findings indicate that the impact
of divorce on children is cumulative and
extends into adulthood.© Jupiter Imagesresearch I conducted for this book
brought me to one inescapable and
irrefutable conclusion: I had been
wrong. Quite simply, I discovered in
my research that the process and
aftermath of divorce is so pervasively
disastrous to body, mind and spirit that
in an overwhelming number
of cases, the“cure”that it brings is
surely worse than the marriage’s
“disease.”(1989, ch. 1).