DIVORCE STUDY BREAKS NEW GROUND
If you've been in the marriage debate for 20 years, you seldom hear something really new.
But Elizabeth Marquardt (a former colleague of mine at the Institute for American Values) has just released a startlingly original study of children of divorce, "Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce" (Crown). Marquardt is a child of a good divorce herself, with parents who both continued to love, see and support her.
Marquardt has two insights: The first is that suffering matters. The divorce debate has been obsessed with social science pathologies -- if you get divorced, will your child be a high school dropout? A pregnant teen? Clinically depressed? And yes, the social science evidence shows that when parents don't stay married, children are at increased risk for these negative outcomes and a whole lot more. (My shop, the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, just released "Do Married Parents Reduce Crime?" a review of recent research linking family structure and delinquency.
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