Tuesday, September 28, 2010
The Impact of Divorce
This week I was asked to provide some information to a judge on the impact of the so-called “no-fault” divorce laws that have been enacted in many states. This judge is very concern about what he is seeing take place in the legal system when couples can obtain these unilateral divorces.
It did not take long to discover that there are many victims, including children. Just this week a friend and co-worker shared the pain be experience by her adolescent granddaughter experiencing the horror of divorce. Yes, I did say horror.
Each year, more than one million American children are victims of their parents’ divorce. Additionally, half of all children born in wedlock this year will see their parents’ divorce before reaching their eighteenth birthday.
Social science research is showing that the effects of divorce continue into adulthood and affect future generations of children as well. Reversing the effects of divorce will entail nothing less than a cultural shift in attitude, if not a cultural revolution, because society still embraces divorce in its laws and popular culture, sending out myriad messages that "it's okay."
It is not. Mounting evidence in the annals of scientific journals details the plight of the children of divorce. It clearly indicates that divorce has lasting effects which spill over into every aspect of life. For example:
- Children of divorced parents are increasingly the victims of abuse and neglect. They exhibit more health, behavioral, and emotional problems, are involved more frequently in crime and drug abuse, and have higher suicide rates.
- Children of parents who have divorced more frequently demonstrate a diminished learning capacity, performing more poorly than their peers from intact two-parent families in reading, spelling, and math. They have higher dropout rates and lower rates of college graduation.
- Divorce generally reduces the income of the child's primary household and seriously diminishes the potential of every household member to accumulate wealth. For families that were not poor before the divorce, the drop in income can be as much as 50 percent.
- Religious worship, which has been linked to health and happiness as well as longer marriages and better family life, is less prevalent in divorced families.
The effects of divorce are immense. The research shows that it permanently weakens the relationship between a child and his parents and leads to destructive ways of handling conflict and a poorer self-image. Children of divorce demonstrate an earlier loss of virginity, more cohabitation, higher expectations of divorce, higher divorce rates later in life, and less desire to have children. These effects on future family life perpetuate the downward spiral of family breakdown.
So, don’t be deceived, when the thought comes to your mind or you hear someone say that our children will be better off if we divorce.
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