Topic : Divorce

• A body of research has shown that divorce has negative effects on a child’s psychological, emotional, and physical health and well-being.
• Divorce is shown to have more severe financial consequences for women than for men. Research has found that a woman’s disposable income drops about 30 percent after a divorce while a man’s falls about 10 percent (Stroup and Pollock, 1994).
• Men who divorce suffer greater health problems than their married counterparts. A research review done by Robert Coombs of UCLA found married adults generally reported healthier, longer, and more satisfied lives than their unmarried peers (Coombs, 1991).
• Sara McLanahan of Princeton University concluded in her 1991 study that “adolescents in mother-only families are more susceptible to peer influence than those living with both natural parents.”
• “Research has documented that children without fathers more often have lowered academic performance, more cognitive and intellectual deficits, increased adjustment problems, and higher risks for psychological development problems.” This conclusion was reached by George Rekers, a practicing clinical psychologist and professor at the University of South Carolina medical school, in a 1986 testimony before the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families.
• The conclusions of these researchers are just examples of the volumes of social science research that has documented the unquestionable and unequaled goodness and benefit brought to children through families headed by their married mother and father.
• While many Washington state parents would agree that marriage is a lifetime commitment, as evidenced by their agreement and disagreement with the statements below, the number of divorces and percentage of children living in single-parent families continue to climb. Husbands and wives need to see that there is hope for their marriage—that there are people who care and tools that can help them not just survive but thrive in their commitment to one another and their children.

Sources unknown

Marriage Builders, pp. 6-7

How many times have you heard or read that 50 percent of U.S. marriages end in divorce? It’s not true. Yes, the number of divorces each year is about half the number of marriages that same year. But that’s like computing the death rate by comparing the number of people who die with the number of people who are born.

That ignores those who neither were born nor died during that 12-month period. The 50-percent divorce figure ignores the number of intact marriages from years and decades earlier.

The truth is that about one of 50 marriages ends each year, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. Pollster Louis Harris maintains that 90 percent of marriages survive until one partner dies.

Daniel Lynch, American Journalism Review, quoted in Reader’s Digest, p. 90

My advice is to say you love each other for the rest of your lives. Don’t get a divorce. -

Third-grader Britney (An 8-year-old who helped her class write a book, Advice for a Happy Marriage, for their teacher, Debi Crawford of Telluride, Colo. Associated Press, April 9, 1995.)

Focus on the Family Citizen, June 19, 1995, p. 8

Howard Hendricks was speaking at a conference in Dallas, and asked the question of the audience of 2000, “Do you know someone who is perfect?” He was about to go on, when he noticed a lone hand raised in the back of the auditorium. Hendricks asked, “Are you perfect, or do you know someone who is?” The man replied, “Oh, no, I’m not perfect. But as far as I can tell, my wife’s first husband was.”

It is easier in these United States to walk away from a marriage than from a commitment to purchase a used car. Most contracts cannot be unilaterally abrogated; marriages in contemporary America can be terminated by practically anyone at any time, and without cause.

Time, September, 1993, quote from a professor at George Washington University School of Law

Sixty percent of American children born today will see their parents divorced by the time they are 18. Of those children who have suffered this pain of divorce, half of them will see a second divorce before they are 18.

Syndicated columnist Michael McManus, Baptist Press release, March, 1995

A friend of mine, Dave Johnson, is a policeman in San Jose, California. One morning, he was called to the scene of a family disturbance. When he arrived, he found another family that would soon be added to the casualty list. “The woman was crying and yelling at her husband who was standing with his hands in the pockets of greasy overalls. I noticed homemade tattoos on his arm, usually a sign that someone had been in prison. I was glad that my “fill unit” had arrived.

I stepped from my patrol car. As I walked towards the two I could hear the woman yelling at her husband to fix whatever he had done to the car so she could leave. He made no reply, but only laughed at her with a contemptuous laugh. She turned to me and asked me to make him fix the car. My fill unit broke in and we “split” the two up so that we could find a solution to the problem. I began talking to the husband who said that his wife was having an affair and she was leaving. I asked him if they had gone for counseling and he said that he was not interested. He went on to say that he was interested in only getting his “things” back. He said that his wife had hidden them from him.

I asked his wife about his things and she said she wouldn’t give them to him until she got one of the three VCRs they owned. I found out later that his “things” consisted of the narcotics he dealt in. The other officer went to the wife’s car and began looking under the hood to see if he could spot the trouble. The husband walked over, took the coil from his pocket, and handed it to the officer. He then told his wife that she could have one of the VCRs if he could have his things. She finally agreed and went into the house.

As she entered the house, I noticed two little girls standing in the doorway, watching the drama unfold. They were about eight and ten years old. Both wore dresses and clung to a Cabbage Patch doll. At their feet were two small suitcases. My eyes couldn’t leave their faces as they watched the two people they loved tear each other apart. The woman emerged with the VCR in her arms and went to the car where she put in into the crowded back seat. She turned and told her husband where he could find his things. They both agreed that they had equal shares of the things they had accumulated in 10 years of marriage.

Then as I stood in unbelief, I watched the husband point to the two little girls and say to the wife, “Well, which one do you want?” Without any apparent emotion, the mother chose the older one. The girls looked at each other as the older one picked up her suitcase and then climbed into her mother’s car. I had to stand and watch as the littlest girl, still clutching her Cabbage Patch doll in one hand and her suitcase in the other, watched her big sister and her mother drive off. I watched as tears streamed down her face in total bewilderment. The only “comfort” she received was an order from her father to go into the house as he turned to talk with some friends. There I stood, the unwilling witness to the death of a family.

Steve Farrar, Point Man, pp. 21-23

Divorced couples in Albuquerque, New Mexico, can take advantage of a new business in town. The company is called Freedom Rings: Jewelry for the Divorced. Founded by jeweler and divorcee Lynn Peters, the company makes custom jewelry out of wedding rings. Each customer at Freedom Rings pays a fee, and the ring-smashing ceremony begins—complete with champagne and music. Just before the smashing the M. C. says, “We will now release any remaining ties to your past by transforming your ring—which represents the past—into a token of your new beginning. Now take the hammer. Stop for a moment to consider the transformation that is about to begin your new life. Ready? With this swing let freedom ring!”

She then uses a four-pound sledgehammer to whack her emblem of love and fidelity into a shapeless piece of metal. And the ceremony ends. The fact that women are pounding their wedding rings into pendants and men are grinding theirs into golf ball markers doesn’t surprise me. We’ve all heard the divorce statistics. But let’s focus on the women for a moment: How many American women stop short of divorce, but would love to make a clean break from their marriage if it were convenient? How many Christian women feel the same way?

Brian Peterson, New Man, October, 1994, p. 8

In order to uncover the processes that destroy unions, marital researchers study couples over the course of years, and even decades, and retrace the star-crossed steps of those who have split up back to their wedding day. What they are discovering is unsettling. None of the factors one would guess might predict a couple’s durability actually does: not how in love a newlywed couple say they are; how much affection they exchange; how much they fight or what they fight about. In fact, couples who will endure and those who won’t look remarkably similar in the early days. Yet when psychologists Cliff Notarius of Catholic University and Howard Markman of the University of Denver studied newlyweds over the first decade of marriage, they found a very subtle but telling difference at the beginning of the relationships. Among couples who would ultimately stay together, 5 out of every 100 comments made about each other were putdowns. Among couples who would later split, 10 of every 100 comments were insults. That gap magnified over the following decade, until couples heading downhill were flinging five times as many cruel and invalidating comments at each other as happy couples. “Hostile putdowns act as cancerous cells that, if unchecked, erode the relationship over time,” says Notarius, who with Markman co-authored the new book We Can Work It Out. “In the end, relentless unremitting negativity takes control and the couple can’t get through a week without major blowups.”

U.S. News & World Report, February 21, 1994, p. 67

“Come into the living room, children. We have something we need to tell you.” That’s how our parents told us they were not going to be together anymore. After they told us they were divorcing, I sat under the table and my mind replayed again and again the words my father said. I didn’t know then what it all meant, but I soon learned.

After Dad left, I looked through the drawers where he kept his clothes and found an old sweat shirt he left behind. I hid it in my room and kept it for years. I would cling to it when I was lonely for him.

My father came back to see us a few times, but his visits became less and less frequent. Finally his visits stopped completely. I always wondered where he went. I wondered if he thought about us very much. I hoped that he did. But I guess I’ll never know.

Always Daddy’s Girl, by H. Norman Wright, 1989, Regal Books, p. 86

Why do toy makers watch the divorce rate? When it rises, so do toy sales. According to the analyzers, four parents and eight grandparents tend to compete for children’s affections, so buy toys.

L. M. Boyd, 3-15-93, Spokesman Review

More and more people seem to forget Henry Ford’s sage advice when asked on his 50th wedding anniversary for his rule for marital bliss and longevity. He replied, “Just the same as in the automobile business, stick to one model.”

Christian Clippings, p. 27

Item No. 583B in our Love and War man’s files is a report on the bequests to his former wives of the socialite yachtsman Fuller E. Callaway, Jr. It stands as a commentary of the chances for happiness in multiple marriages. He left $100,000 to his first wife, $10,000 to his second, and $1 to his third.

L. M. Boyd, Spokesman-Review, July 28, 1992.

One study found that 18 months after a divorce, children have a rate of sudden, serious psychological problems comparable to “victims of natural disaster.” Sixty-five percent of the children—who had been functioning well before the divorce—couldn’t concentrate in school, couldn’t eat or sleep properly, couldn’t make friends, were depressed, withdrawn or hostile. Even ten years after a divorce , over 40 percent of these young people still had no set goals, a limited education and a sense of hopelessness about their lives. The study’s author concludes, “Almost half of the children of divorce enter adulthood as worried, underachieving and sometimes angry young men and women.”

Senator Dan Coates, Imprimis, Vol 20, #9, September, 1991

I thought of how important the strength of a marriage is to children when I saw a quote by Pete Rose, Jr., recently. The betting scandal his father was in meant little to Petey. He still dwelt on his parents’ years-old divorce. His father was remarried with a new child and another on the way. His mother was tending bar in Cincinnati. Petey is a better-than-average big league prospect himself, and athletes at that stage in their careers are usually single-minded and driven. Yet Petey said something like this: “I would trade whatever future I have in big league baseball to see my parents get back together.” It was as if he hadn’t read the papers, didn’t know the truth about his parents’ marriage. Pete, Sr. had such an incredible reputation for chasing women, and such nasty, impossible-to-take-back things had been said by each about the other, that no one would give two cents for the possibility of any civility, let alone a reconciliation. And with Pete, Sr., remarried, there’s no chance. Yet that comment from little Pete, if he were my son, would haunt me to my grave.

Jerry Jenkins, Hedges, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, 1989, p. 128

Practice doesn’t make perfect. According to studies by the Barna Foundation and the Census Bureau, people who cohabitate before marriage—that’s half of all adults under the age of 30—are more likely than others to get divorced, and 60 percent of second marriages eventually split up. With that kind of failure rate, perhaps it’s time to stop practicing and get into the game for good. Marriage is for life.

Break Point with Charles Colson, Vol. 1, No. 6, August, 1991

75% of divorced people remarry—and 60% of them already have children. If current trends continue, stepfamilies could outnumber traditional families by the year 2000.

Dr. Nazli Baydar, in Homemade, October, 1989

Percentage of marriages today that are remarriages for one or both partners: 46.

American Demographics, 10/88, reported in Single Adult Ministries Journal, 1/89.

If your parents are divorced, are you more likely to divorce someday? Yes. Women whose parents are divorced are at least 50 percent more likely to follow suit than other women. For men, there’s also a greater likelihood.

From What are the Chances, B Siskin and J Staller, 1989

Baby boomers were four times more likely than their parents to live together outside of marriage and four times as likely to get divorced...”Almost half of children of divorces enter adulthood as worried, under-achieving, self-deprecating and sometimes angry young men and women,” said psychologist Judith Wallerstain...a recent survey of Swedish women showed couples who lived together before marrying had nearly an 80 percent higher divorce rate than those who did not.

Focus on the Family, January, 1990, p. 8

Doctor George Crane, M.D., Ph. D., the clinical columnist in newspapers throughout North America, has calculated that when a married couple are active together in the same church they have about a 50 times greater chance of avoiding divorce; and that only one in 500 marriages breaks up where there is a family altar. . . Nine out of ten of both sexes attach maximum priority in life to a happy marriage.

John W. White, What Does It Mean to be Born Again?

The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that 6 of 10 women in their 30’s will have their first marriage end in divorce. The problem is charged to changing male-female roles, the massive entrance of women into the work force and social revolutions in the late 60’s.

USA Today, quoted in Intercessors for America, June, 1986

Children from broken homes cause a strikingly disproportionate share of discipline problems in schools and fare far worse academically than their peers from two-parent homes, according to an extensive new study. For every two-parent child disciplined, the study says, teachers took to task three one-parent children. Comparing children from broken homes to those with both parents, the ratio for dropouts was 9 to 5; for expulsions, 8 to 1.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the rising divorce rate means 48% of school children during the next decade will come from one-parent homes.

Chicago Tribune, quoted in His, November, 1980

From U.S. Census Bureau reports:

Source unknown

60% of all divorces involve children. Approximately 1,000,000 children each year are affected by divorce.”

Marriage and Family, April, 1980

Fifty years ago parents were apt to have a lot of kids. Nowadays kids are apt to have a lot of parents. - E. Lawson

Source unknown

“Almost half of children of divorces enter adulthood as worried, underachieving, self-deprecating, and sometimes angry young men and women.” reports Judith Wallerstein, director of the Center for the Family in Transition and author of Second Chance (Ticknor & Fields, 1988). Her conclusion is drawn from interviews conducted over a 15 year period with 60 families, mostly white middle class.

Other Wallerstein findings: Three out of five youngsters felt rejected by at least one parent. Half grew up in settings in which the parents were warring with each other even after the divorce.

Reported in Time, 2/6/89

A study of divorced couples with preschool children shows that after a year of divorce, 60% of men and 73% of women feel they made a mistake and should have tried harder to make marriage work. People have no idea how much anguish and stress is caused by divorce.

Dr. E. Mavis Hetherington in Homemade, October, 1989

Tod had left his wife and children for another woman, but Linda, his wife, refused him a divorce. She said that she still loved him and that he could still love her. One morning, after a night of empty sex and not much sleep, he drove to their house and saw his wife through the window getting the breakfast ready and the children off to school—as he said, “doing what she had to do to keep their life, her life, my life intact.”

He was overcome with a sense of her commitment to holding together a warm good life. He asked her that day to let him come back, recognizing that she was his very right, and much beloved wife.

Reader’s Digest, August, 1982

For many years I’ve publicly challenged the widely-held belief that one of two marriages ends in divorce. It was obviously not true. Some academics incorrectly calculated this ratio by noting that 1.2 million divorces and 2.4 million marriages were reported for 1981. The truth finally prevails. A Louis Harris poll now calls the one-of-two divorce rate a myth. “What was left out is that there are 54 million other marriages that are going on very nicely. By combining ongoing and new marriages in any single year, only 2 percent of existing marriages will end in divorce.

A number of academics made a sensational splash out of it.” Dr. Lee Salk comments, “This survey is incredibly important. It tells us that TV’s Cosby family is depicting a better picture of American family life than anything else.

J. Allan Petersen in Homemade, October, 1987

A five year study of children of divorced parents in California questions that children are better off when their parents divorce than when they stay in an unhappy marriage. Many of the children would have been “content to hobble along in an unhappy marriage and they did not experience the divorce as a solution to their unhappiness.” Most of them harbored fantasies of a “magical reconciliation.” The divorced family is less adaptive economically, socially, and psychologically to the raising of children than the two-parent family.

Psychology Today, in Homemade, July, 1985