ON RUTH BETTELHEIM'S 1970s-ERA ARGUMENT ABOUT NO-FAULT DIVORCE, PUBLISHED AS A NEW IDEA IN THE NEW YORK TIMES LAST WEEK

Pasted below, a not-published letter I wrote to the New York Times in response to the Ruth Bettelheim op-ed last week:

To the editor:

Ruth Bettelheim writes that because parental conflict is bad for children, the solution is to make divorce easier to get. If only it were that simple.

In our nationally-representative study of adult children of divorce, Professor Norval Glenn of the University of Texas at Austin and I found that even successful young people are profoundly shaped by childhood divorce. They report traveling between two worlds, having to make sense of their parents’ different beliefs, values, and ways of living in a way their parents were no longer required to do. Most said their parents did *not* have a lot of conflict after the divorce, and yet the grown children of divorce report a profound and lonely inner conflict, even when their parents did not fight.

Professors Paul Amato and Alan Booth found that about one-third of divorces end high-conflict marriages, and children generally fare better after those marriages end. But about two-thirds of divorces end low-conflict marriages, and those children on average do worse.

As a culture, we can do better.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Marquardt
Author, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce
posted by Marquardt at 1:11 PM VOTE

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