Wallerstein on Divorce

IDEAS - By ELISABETH BUMILLER, December 16, 2000, New York Times

 Sometimes even Judith Wallerstein thinks it might be a really good idea for people to divorce. It happens when women tell her that they've read her book and she's changed their lives, that they're going to stay with their husbands after all. What, she wonders, does that mean? What are the husbands like? And what should she say?

"I'm really stymied," she said last week over coffee at the Princeton Club in Midtown Manhattan. "I'm not often stymied for words. You don't want to say, `I hope it was the right decision.' I mean, that seems sort of a dumb thing to say. But I don't feel, `Oh, my God, that's wonderful, one more marriage saved.' Maybe it was the wrong marriage."

For 20 years, Ms. Wallerstein, now 78, has been the grandmother of an evolving view that divorce is more harmful to children than anyone thought. Divorce may liberate parents, she says, but it traps their sons and daughters for years: "It's a river they've got to cross that other kids don't have. And they've got to find how they do it. They're going to ford that river, or build a bridge over it, or learn to swim… or drown."

She dares to say that couples should consider staying together for the sake of the children, and that it doesn't matter in the slightest to children that their parents don't sleep in the same bed. Her research has attracted a fervent army of critics, particularly feminists, who have attacked her gloomy outlook and her methods of research. She dooms children to lives of unhappiness, her critics say, and encourages people to stay in miserable marriages. This month and last Ms. Wallerstein engaged in a particularly bitter exchange in the pages of The Nation with the columnist Katha Pollitt, who called her work "pseudoscience," criticized her for using composite characters (she does) and pointed out that "every five years her warnings about the dire effects of divorce on children make the headlines, the covers and the talk shows."

That has clearly been the case this season, with little let-up in sight. Ms. Wallerstein's new book, "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study," written with Julia Lewis and Sandra Blakeslee, a regular contributor to The New York Times, has landed her on Oprah (twice), on the cover of Time and on radio call-in shows across America. The bad news about divorce is big news, especially when delivered by someone as savvy and quotable as Ms. Wallerstein.

Ms. Wallerstein's central thesis, drawn from 93 of an original 131 children she has interviewed over the last quarter-century in Marin County, California, is that a parent's divorce is not a time-limited crisis. Rather, she says, it has long-term effects on a child that reach a peak in adulthood. Adult children of divorce are more likely to divorce and have a more difficult time, she says, forming intimate relationships. Even those in solid marriages have trouble handling routine conflict. They have never seen, Ms.Wallerstein said, how arguments are waged and settled among happy partners "like being a dancer without ever having seen a dance."

America's divorce boom began in the 1970's, when no-fault divorce laws the first signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan of California, the country's first divorced president spread across the nation. In an abrupt reversal of tradition, the new view was that divorce, while painful for children, was far better than the damage done by parents who spent dinner throwing cutlery at one another. But Ms.Wallerstein never bought it. Now, she says, more of the world has come around to her. "I'm not running against the tide," she said, adding that even onetime critics like Andrew J. Cherlin, the influential professor at Johns Hopkins University, now confirms her own.

Not so fast, said Mr. Cherlin. Although he acknowledged this week that "there has been some convergence in the view about the long-term effects of divorce" and that his own research now showed that the problems caused by divorce linger he also said that Ms. Wallerstein exaggerates the harm.

"She's a wonderfully sensitive observer of troubled families going through troubled divorces," he said. "But she greatly overstates the percentage of people who will experience serious problems because their parents got divorced." Divorce, he said, does "raise the risk that you might not graduate from high school, or you might have a child as a teenager, or you might have some mental health problems. But most people don't experience those problems. It's as if the risk of getting an illness goes up, but you're still unlikely to get the illness."

David Blankenhorn, a supporter of Ms. Wallerstein and the president of the Institute for American Values, a New York organization that researches family issues, argues that the debate may have something to do with people who use different methods of research: quantitative in the case of Mr. Cherlin, and qualitative in the case of Ms. Wallerstein. "You're talking about two different disciplines," said Mr. Blankenhorn, who favors what he calls the reform of no- fault divorce and supports the strict covenant marriage laws enacted in Arizona and Louisiana.

Mr. Cherlin, a sociologist, has studied the records of thousands of children, while Ms. Wallerstein, a psychologist, has intensively interviewed a much smaller group. (She says she has also interviewed thousands of others at her Center for the Family in Transition in Corte Madera, Calif., whose stories are not included in her book.)

"She wasn't looking for symptom lists, she was actually talking to people about their lives," Mr. Blankenhorn said. "It sounds like a simple little thing, but on the other hand, at the dawn of the divorce revolution, Judy Wallerstein alone said: `I'm going to talk to the children. I'm going to watch them grow up.' "

Ms. Wallerstein readily says that her interest in the study of children and loss comes from her own family history. Her father, a director of Jewish community centers, died of Hodgkin's disease in New York City when she was 8, in an era when death was rarely discussed with children. "I knew he was sick, but I didn't know he was very sick," Ms. Wallerstein said. Her mother, who had emigrated as a child from Russia, never told her that her father was in the hospital. Since he traveled a great deal, Ms. Wallerstein said, she wasn't curious about his absence. His death came as a shock. As was also the custom for children, she did not go to the funeral.

"I didn't believe that he died for a long time," she said. "I didn't know where he was buried, I didn't know anything. And that was very common. That was the advice my mother got. So that I was very aware of issues in parent-child relationships, especially the reversal of roles. I'm also very aware of how hard my mother worked in trying to maintain a childhood for us."

To this day, she added, she doesn't know where her father is buried. "In analysis, yes, I did recapture a lot about my father," she said. "But there are things I couldn't ask my mother, O.K.? It was, for her, unbearably painful. And I colluded in that." She was in many ways, she said, a caretaker, much like the super-responsible "Karen," her first case study in the book. "There are whole parts of Karen," Ms. Wallerstein said, "that are part of me."

After her father died, Ms. Wallerstein moved with her mother and younger brother to what was then Palestine, where her mother taught English in Tel Aviv and Ms. Wallerstein received "a very classical" Hebrew education. She returned to New York, graduated from Hunter College, married Robert Wallerstein, then trained the same time he did at the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kans. There, she also had their three children all of them now married with children of their own. In 1966 the family moved to California, where Ms.Wallerstein taught at Berkeley. In 1971 she began her study of the effects of divorce on 131 children from 60 mostly white, affluent families.

Ms. Wallerstein checked in with the children at five-year intervals, producing from their stories her first book, "Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope With Divorce," in 1980 and "Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade after Divorce" in 1989. Her "children" are now 28 to 43.

At the end of her latest book, Ms. Wallerstein offers a few suggestions to ease the impact of divorce on a child. She recommends that mothers she specifically mentions mothers, not fathers, delay re-entry into full-time work "until the youngest child has had time to adjust." She also suggests that money be set aside for college for children at the time of the breakup, before the community property is divided, to guard against a parent who might give priority to a new family after child support stops at age 18. Most strongly, she urges parents to reconsider visitation agreements at regular intervals to avoid staying locked into an arrangement that suited a child at 6 but not at 16.

Meanwhile, is Ms. Wallerstein planning to check in with the children again at the 30- year mark, or the 35th, or even the 50th?

"I'm 78," she said. "Am I going to do this when I'm 100?"