The Shift: 1987-1997

Among family scholars, the shift continues. It’s been ten years since Norval Glenn of the University of Texas, as editor of the Journal of Family Issues, wrote that the views of leading family scholars were beginning to shift from “continuity-sanguineness” to “change-concern.” Glenn meant that scholars in the late 1980s were becoming less likely to view current family trends as a process of gradual and even beneficial adaptation, and more likely to view them as new and socially harmful. 

That trickle of change a decade ago has now become, if not a tidal wave, then at least a respectable current. By 1997, Glenn could describe the shift this way:  “Not all family social scientists participated in this shift, but it is significant that the most prominent scholars and those most directly involved in the relevant research were most likely to do so.”

It’s now fair to add two more names to Glenn’s list: Paul Amato of the University of Nebraska and Allan Booth of Penn State University. Their new book, A Generation at Risk, analyzes longitudinal child outcome data from a large national sample of families, seeking especially to isolate the independent effects of divorce on children from the effects of pre-existing marital conflict. It comes close to being a knockout punch against the prevailing academic and popular rationalizations of our high divorce rate.

The still-dominant view among family scholars and professionals is that parental unhappiness is worse for children than parental divorce:  better for parents to separate rather than expose their children to on-going marital conflict and distress. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly, Francine Russo sums up the conventional wisdom: “children are damaged less by divorce per se than by exposure to intense conflict, whether their families are intact, dissolving, or broken.” 

A Generation at Risk disconfirms the notion that marital conflict outweighs “divorce per se” as a source of childhood problems. Amato and Booth find that only about 25 to 33 percent of parental divorces today end up being better for the children than if the parents had stayed together. By contrast, about 70 percent of divorces represent the termination of low-conflict marriages which, whatever their shortcomings, are distinctly better for children than the reality of divorce. Moreover, Booth and Amato estimate that, as divorce becomes more socially acceptable, an even higher proportion of future divorces will involve precisely those low-conflict situations in which divorce is worse for children than the continuation of marriage.

This reasoning leads the authors to a startling assertion.  For that 70 percent of marriages-in-trouble that are not fraught with conflict, “future generations would be well served if parents remained together until children are grown.”  And again:  “Spending one-third of one’s life living in a marriage that is less than satisfactory in order to benefit children - children that parents elected to bring into the world - is not an unreasonable expectation.”

This conclusion comes from two left-of-center social scientists, some of whose earlier writings have clearly suggested that one-parent homes are not especially harmful for children. Amato, in particular, has been frequently and favorably cited in recent years by anti-anti-divorce writers, and for good reason.  Consider his 1987 book, Children in Australian Families:  The Growth of Competence. (Amato spent a number of years living and working in Australia, where family trends are similar to those in the U.S.) In the book’s final chapter, Amato sums up his major ideas. 

The book’s most important theme is that harmful “stereotypes” often prevent us from seeing families “as they really are.” For example, here is what Amato in 1987 viewed as an especially harmful stereotype:  “It is better to stay together for the sake of the children than to divorce.” Widely believed, he tells us, but untrue. He even reminds us that “in harmonious one-parent families, children [in his study] had particularly high self-esteem.” 

Another 1987 theme is “the resilience of children in adapting to different family circumstances.” Accordingly, “no single family type is associated with optimal child development. Instead, children are highly adaptable and are capable of adjusting to a wide range of family forms and circumstances. If nothing else, this implies that our community needs to develop a greater tolerance for, and appreciation of, the diversity of family forms that exist today.” The final two themes are “the limitations of the family’s influence on children” and “the generally positive nature of family life for children.”

You get the point. From “The Growth of Competence” to “A Generation at Risk,” Amato has traveled quite a distance.  Not just geographically, from Australia back to the U.S., or chronologically, from 1987 to 1997, but also, and most importantly, intellectually:  from a qualified defender of the current family trend to one of its most informed critics. 

We should not blame Paul Amato and Allan Booth for inconsistency, any more than we should blame other leading scholars, or for that matter ourselves, for revising previous views in light of current evidence.  Instead, we should thank them. The shift continues.

Sources: Norval D. Glenn, “Continuity Versus Change, Sanguineness Versus Concern: Views of the American Family in the Late 1980s,” Journal of Family Issues 8, no. 4 (December 1987). For 1997 Glenn quote, Maggie Gallagher and David Blankenhorn, “Family Feud,” The American Prospect, July-August 1997. Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 238. Francine Russo, “Can the Government Prevent Divorce?” The Atlantic Monthly, October 1997. Paul Amato, Children in Australian Families: The Growth of Competence (Melbourne: Australian Institute of Family Studies, 1987), 242-248.

First published Spring 1998.