Hello?

But I can’t let go of this issue yet. Yes, it’s important that Andrew Cherlin has apparently shifted his thinking. It’s also helpful for scholars to point out that some problems experienced by children of divorce have roots that predate the divorce itself, and that parental conflict, both before and after divorce, can be especially damaging to the emotional health of children. And thanks again to Paul Amato and Allan Booth for A Generation at Risk, in which they show that most divorces affecting children today involve the termination of relatively low-conflict marriages. But can we talk? This whole exercise of trying to isolate the effects of pre-divorce marital problems from the effects of divorce is largely a waste of time. Often, it’s fraud.  

The basic game here is to disassemble a social phenomenon into its constituent parts, then use the effects of one part to throw doubt upon the effects of another part, or upon the effects of the phenomenon as a whole. It’s almost always an unjustified game. In this case, suggesting that the effects of pre-divorce conflict somehow oppose, or diminish, the effects of divorce itself is but one of several variations on what may be the worst intellectual dodge currently being practiced in family studies: the notion that something called “family process” overrides or negates the importance of family structure.

Thus, family scholars today frequently insist that what really matters for children is not how many parents live in the home (family structure), but instead the quality of the relationships among family members. But of course, in real life, the two things are connected. If I am ten years old, whether I live with my father, or whether my father moves to Oregon to marry someone other than my mother, surely affects my relationship with my father. 

This same problem in logic confronts scholars who imply that the effects of “pre-disruptive” family processes (parents who squabble and can’t get along) should soothe or qualify our concerns about the impact of divorce. Again, watch the disassembly. If “divorce” is too narrow a term, let’s call the problem we don’t like “family fragmentation.” Part of this problem is parents who squabble and can’t get along. Another part is the decision to divorce. Another part is parents trying to relate to one another after the divorce regarding the rearing of their children, a challenge that typically generates its own share of “post-disruptive” parental conflict. 

Now, if our goal is to reverse the trend of family fragmentation, does it help us to be told by scholars that recognizing one aspect of this problem - parents who squabble and can’t get along - means that the problem itself somehow becomes smaller or less worthy of our concern? Ultimately, then, the question of whether or not some new data from Britain prompt Andrew Cherlin and his colleagues to shift their scales a bit - a little heavier on divorce, a little lighter on parental conflict - is beside the point. The scales themselves are arbitrary and misleading, which in turn corrupts this entire way of arguing. 

Here’s the proposition: Scholars who seek effectively to pit parental conflict against divorce, as if they were competing candidates for a prize, produce more confusion than insight. They should consider reorienting their thinking.

First published Winter 1999.