The news, according to USA Today, is "balm to the souls of parents who have chosen to end their marriages": 20 years later, about three-quarters of children of divorce are "functioning in the normal range," establishing careers, creating intimate relationships, building meaningful lives.

How should we think about divorce? That depends in part on who is doing the thinking. For children of divorce, who did not, after all, choose their parents' marital status, concentrating on the good news is appropriate. I have one fatherless son. I would certainly hate to imagine he thought of himself as permanently damaged goods.

But the potential grave danger stemming from Hetherington's well-meaning message of encouragement is what it may convey to parents: Go ahead and divorce; your kids will do fine.

In actual fact, the news from this study is not new, despite the marketing spin. The results are consistent with a large and growing social science literature: Even among advantaged, middle-class white children, divorce doubles the risk that (ITAL) 20 years later (UNITAL) adult children would experience serious social, emotional and/or psychological dysfunction.

But long-term dysfunction is not the only risk of divorce. Hetherington herself, while accentuating the positive, is too good a scholar to ignore the emotional realities: Divorce is "usually brutally painful. ... To the boys and girls in my research, divorce seemed cataclysmic and inexplicable. How could a child feel safe in a world where adults had suddenly become untrustworthy?"

Bethany is one of Hetherington's success stories. As an adult, she is doing extremely well, thanks to her mother's heroic parenting. I certainly do not blame her mother for choosing divorce -- her husband's repeated infidelities were the proximate cause. And yet this is what divorce meant for Bethany: "The previously placid Bethany also would fly into rages, hitting and biting her mother, whom she blamed for the separation. In her distress, she began to wet the bed again, had night terrors, and would wake crying or crawl into bed with Liddy three or four times a night. Bethany later said, 'I had to keep checking to see if Mom was there. If Dad could leave, why couldn't she?'"

Very few of these highly educated and successful men figured out how to be effective fathers outside of marriage. Twenty years later, about two-thirds of boys and three-quarters of girls had poor relationships with their fathers compared to 30 percent of children from intact marriages. Continued...