Divorce: The Myth of the Good Divorce

Elizabeth Marquardt’s research has concluded that even though a good divorce is better than a bad divorce, it is still not good for children. She found that children from a mannerly divorce often compare poorly to children from an unhappy marriage, so long as that marriage is low-conflict (2/3 of marriages that end in divorce are.) As reported in much of the divorce literature, these kids don’t perform as well academically; they are more delinquent; they use more drugs; and they are more sexually active.

But an additional problem that children of divorce face is the problem of developing a unified world view. Though a mom’s and a dad’s personalities, morals, religious beliefs, and parenting styles always differ, in most marriages they recognize that they have the job of rubbing the rough edges of their own worlds together in an attempt to hand [children] something reasonably whole.

But after the divorce, there is little motivation for ex-spouses to be unified. One child explained: So you’d go with one and they’d be like, “Ah, stay out till ten! You can walk to the playground!” And the other one’s like, “You can’t go anywhere! You have a bike but you have to ride it in your yard.” With conflicting rules, these kids have to stay on their toes: We paid close attention to the different rules at each parent’s home and the conflicts in their expectations of us.... We adjusted ourselves to each of our parents, shaping our habits and beliefs to mimic theirs when we were around them. We often felt like a different person with each of our parents.

These kids felt like chameleons as they tried to adapt to their changing environment. But they weren’t designed for such major adaptation: We looked to two worlds that seemed as different as night and day. The chasm between the two worlds made reconciling their differences seem much more daunting, perhaps even impossible. They became mentally stuck when they tried to answer life’s greatest questions--Who am I? Is there a God? What is the good?--because they didn’t have a settled identity.

Though they don’t have to remain caught between two worlds forever—there is renewal through Christ—we make the task of establishing a unified, life-guiding identity much harder when they don’t have unified parents.