Whew, this is heavy stuff!
This is a new direction in studying kids of divorce/separation. Most studies on children look for outward, quantifiable measures indicating symptoms of internal struggle and trauma. This includes acting out, school performance, drugs, early sex, drinking, depression, bullying, and so on.
A primary example is the March 2002 extensive meta-analysis published in the Journal of the American Psychological Association. It found that children of divorced/separated homes can do just as well in a low-conflict joint custody situation as children from intact homes. The study primarily measured outcomes.
Enter Marquardt's new book, published September 2006.
The author is a product of a broken home from the time of her infancy. Her upbringing was perhaps a bit odder than perhaps the average kid of divorce, with one parent being a hippy "commune" type and the other going mainstream.
Despite the outward measures that never showed anything but a well-adjusted child, she experienced on-going struggle between her two homes, her two worlds.
In preparation to writing this book, she surveyed 1500 young adults, half from divorced families and half from intact families.
The book is a combination of a straight report on her findings, her interpretation of the findings, and I think a little bit of projection from her own upbringing.
Despite what I feel is a minimal but still present bias, Marquardt really does well to capture some of the very elusive and usually lonely internal struggles facing kids of broken homes. To be clear, she never claims that the internal suffering doesn't prevent overall happiness.
The book is a calling to awareness, not a manual or recipe for correcting our children's internal suffering (despite the outward measures of welfare).
One passage of hers did well for me to grasp the crux of her entire presentation.
I paraphrase (not as eloquently written as the author's own words)... in a marriage, two people from different worlds must come together and make things work. Conflicts between the parents somehow come to a middle ground or place of peace. At minimum, there grows to be an understanding of how the house is run, what rules apply, and how the two worlds of the different parents somehow create a single world-- so long as the marriage is kept together.
Yet, upon separation/divorce, the two worlds split again. The parents go back to their separate worlds, certainly creating peace and harmony within each world-- but no longer in a single world.
The responsibility for making sense of the two worlds is abruptly transferred from the parents onto the children.
The children become the bridge between the worlds... a responsibility that intact homes leave to parents.
Marquardt lays out in her book that -- even in a "good divorce" -- the child has responsibility with immense internal burdens that are confusing, often hopeless, and often overwhelming to manage.
It's a book that every separated parent should read, for greater empathy as to what the children endure. Once separated (perhaps for good reason), there is no big "fix" to the struggle of the child. However, it's likely helpful to the child if the parent can understand what it's like to live between two worlds.
For a parent truly vested in his/her child's welfare, this is a pretty heavy read. But the enlightenment gained is worth it.
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