No Good Divorce: The Children's Perspective is an interview in Christian Century with author Elizabeth Marquardt who has published Between Two Worlds : The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. She shares some fascinating insights. I may have to add her book to my list.
Children who grow up traveling between two worlds feel early on the need to confront—alone—the big moral questions: What's right and wrong? What do I believe? Where do I belong? Is there a God? What is true? They feel the need to confront these questions because they see dramatically contrasting answers in each parent's world. In fact, they're much more likely to see their parents as polar opposites even when they don't fight. Any answer they glean from one world can be undermined by looking at the other.
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We discovered that children of divorce are far less likely when they grow up to say they are very or even fairly religious. They're far less likely to attend a house of worship frequently. There is about a 14 percent difference in this area between children of divorce and children of intact families. They're also less likely to be a member of a house of worship or to be a leader there.
Partly this is because the children are less likely to have been involved in a community of faith as a child. Divorce itself makes it difficult logistically for parents to stay connected to any kind of community.
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Too often the debate on children of divorce gets turned into a debate on whether parents should be getting divorced in the first place. That move silences the experience of kids.
I imagined the first audience for my book being the grown children of divorce; it's aimed at helping them understand and articulate their experience. The second audience I imagined is married parents who may have considered divorce. I want to help them understand not just what divorce does to a child, but what marriage does for a child. And finally, for divorced parents I think this book illuminates the inner experience of their child in ways they may not have considered. If they can better understand their child's inner world, they can help their child feel less isolated.
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