By contrast, parents in deeply disappointing but intact marriages were much more able to maintain higher-quality parenting, and the children benefited from a greater sense of protection and better relationships with both mothers and fathers. "Open conflict often only arises for the first time in the opening scenes of a dying marriage," says Wallerstein. Children of intact marriages viewed success in marriage and children more as a matter of course. They do not view each quarrel as a prelude to abandonment and helplessness. As one woman put it to her husband early in the marriage, "Look, if my folks could do it, so can we." Men typically drew closer to their fathers in adulthood, cherished their new relationships with extended family, and were more willing to support their aging fathers financially and emotionally. Divorce, by contrast, disrupts not only the parental generation's relationships, but relationships between the generations.
Dr. Wallerstein's work has been criticized for not being nationally representative. As University of Chicago Professor Linda Waite, one of the nation's foremost sociologists and demographers, pointed out at this symposium, "Expecting this kind of in-depth psychological work to be conducted the way demographers do national surveys is irrational and unscientific." Dr. Wallerstein's results are shocking precisely because her sample is not an average sample: It represents a group of highly advantaged kids -- mostly white, middle-class with well-educated and affluent parents, who were developmentally and psychologically in good shape before the divorce. To find such lasting consequences under the best of conditions is truly shocking.
When she started her work in the early '70s, the conventional wisdom was that "if parents were unhappy, so must children be." This, says Wallerstein flatly, is "simply untrue." Many children were quite content in an emotionally disappointing marriage. "We have conflated children's needs with the wishes of adults, and it works," as Wallerstein says with such devastating clarity, only "so long as we avoid talking to children."