Cathy Young has an written excellent, objective look (Dr. Bad News) at research by Judith Wallerstein, touted by conservatives and loathed by feminists, that claims children of divorced parents suffer from the effects of divorce well into adulthood.
Although concerned about the effects of divorce (who, after all, isn’t?), Young finds more smoke than fire behind Wallerstein’s claims. One of the problems with Wallerstein’s latest research, as well as her earlier material, is that the people she interviewed for her book seem to be an unrepresentative sample. Young writes,
Findings from national studies, cited by Wallerstein in the appendix, cast further doubt on her methodology. Forty percent of adult children of divorce in her sample never married, compared with just 24 percent in the same age range in a series of national surveys. In both studies, around 40 percent of the marriages had ended in divorce.
The national data, however, show only a moderately lower prevalence of divorce for people raised in intact families (35 percent) — whereas in Wallerstein’s “intact” comparison sample, only 9 percent of the marriages had broken up. And while Wallerstein found that men and women whose parents had divorced were much less likely to have children than were those from intact marriages, national data indicate no difference in childbearing rates between the two groups.
In fact Young and some of the people she interviews repeatedly note, Wallerstein’s claim that there are large differences between children of divorced parents vs. children of non-divorced parents is contradicted by numerous studies, which do find small differences but nothing of the magnitude that Wallerstein claims.
Once again Young brings her sharp mind to debunking an over-reaching claims and bringing a common sense analysis to a controversial issue.