A Proposal to Reduce Unnecessary Divorce - Razorplanet

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In a compelling use of data, Professor Amato examined indicators of child wellbeing
in America to ask how child trends would look if the nation regained the
family trends of recent decades:
Increasing the share of adolescents living with two biological parents to
the 1970 level…would mean that 643,264 fewer children would repeat
a grade. Increasing the share of adolescents in two-parent families to the
1960 level suggests that nearly three-quarters of a million fewer children
would repeat a grade. Similarly, increasing marital stability to its 1980
level would result in nearly half a million fewer children suspended from
school, about 200,000 fewer children engaging in delinquency or violence,
a quarter of a million fewer children receiving therapy, about a quarter
of a million fewer smokers, about 80,000 fewer children thinking about
suicide, and about 28,000 fewer children attempting suicide. 5
An important recent trend in research has been to investigate not only the effects
of divorce on children, but also the effects of multiple family transitions
that often follow after divorce. As mentioned above, the divorce rate for first
marriages is about 40 to 50 percent, and about 60 percent for remarriages. Cohabiting
unions are even more unstable. Thus, children whose parents divorce
often go through not just one family transition, but several or many (especially
given that after a divorce a child’s mother and father are each following separate
relationship paths). These studies are showing that the more transitions
children go through, the more behavior problems and delinquent behavior they
have, the lower their academic achievement and psychological well-being, and
the greater their risk for having a non-marital birth and relationship instability
in adulthood. 6 Overall, the optimistic view that if parents divorce they will each
soon marry someone else with whom they will be happy, and then the children
will have stability, is not typically borne out.
Scholars are also now studying what is called the “intergenerational transmission
of divorce,” that is, the emerging evidence that getting divorced makes
one’s children more likely someday to divorce, and hence puts one’s grandchildren
at risk for growing up in a divorced family. In the most extensive national
study of the generational cycle of divorce, sociologist Nicholas Wolfinger of the
University of Utah found that divorce increased children’s chance of someday
ending their own marriages by at least 50 percent. Further, grown children of
divorce were 50 percent more likely to marry other children of divorce. If they