One of the nation's leading family researchers has good news for parents racked by guilt over the breakup of their marriages:
Divorce doesn't necessarily leave long-lasting scars on them or their children, and can even enhance some people's lives.
"You haven't given your kid a terminal disease if you've divorced," says E. Mavis Hetherington, whose study of 1,400 families and more than 2,500 children over 30 years is the basis for her new book, For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered (W.W. Norton & Co., $26.95).
The relatively upbeat book barely landed in stores when the two sides in this hot-button debate started squabbling like contentious spouses.
The happily married 75-year-old Hetherington contends that the negative impacts of divorce have been overstated by proponents of the so-called marriage movement, and can lead to self-fulfilling prophecies.
To marriage proponents, her mostly positive assessment is largely hearsay. They cite other studies that show divorce undermines American society and leaves children with long-lasting emotional and social problems.
"Very harmful," Elizabeth Marquardt, a spokeswoman for the pro-marriage Institute on American Values, said of Hetherington's research.
University of Pennsylvania sociologist Frank Furstenberg, however, noted that "the vast majority of researchers" agree with Hetherington's findings.
Though the debate is polarizing, the two people leading it, rival septuagenarian researchers Hetherington and Judith Wallerstein, are surprisingly alike.
Each is a grandmother, a best-selling author, and a highly respected psychologist. Each has conducted long-term studies of divorced parents and their children - Hetherington from her East Coast post as professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia; Wallerstein, 3,000 miles away at her Center for the Family in Transition in California.
Neither has been divorced.
But that's where the similarities end.
The opposing views
According to Hetherington, 75 percent to 80 percent of children from divorced homes are "coping reasonably well and functioning in the normal range" and 70 percent of their parents are leading lives that are "good enough" or better than before.
Within two years of divorce, she writes, the vast majority of children "are beginning to function reasonably well again." Moreover, most young adults from divorced families were "ably going about the central tasks of young adulthood."
