And a lot of people get and have gotten divorced, with a lot of historical variation in theoretical and/or political encouragement.

Joe O points to an important factor. Divorce may not be psychologically damaging for the children of divorced parents in general (I think it is), but economically it sure is. How distressing to consider that it’s yet another source of the ever widening class divide in the U.S.

No reference to regression in this book

You must have loved Herrnstein and Murray’s ‘Bell Curve’.

(Of course, it’s also possible that current relationship styles simply aren’t being captured by the available statistics—if, instead of just marriages, there was a register available of all longterm romantic relationships involving cohabitation or commingling of property and assets, a rather different picture might emerge.)

I agree with the comment that personal stories are just bad “evidence” to draw any generalised conclusions. That doesn’t mean they can not provide some sort of insights. But given that there is so much morality and ideology involved in discussions about divorce, families, etc., people tend to interpret “case stories” so that it tends to fit with their own norms, values, and ideology.

I think it’s good to have a discussion about divorce, but perhaps we should first have a discussion about marriage and procreation. People should think twice before getting married, and think much longer/harder before getting children. There are too many people getting married in order to save a disfunctional relationship, and too many children being born in an attempt to “save” a marriage.

>Researchers say that the small drop in the overall divorce rate is caused by a steep decline in the rate among college graduates. As a result,a “divorce divide” has opened up between those with and without college degrees, said Dr. Steven P. Martin, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Maryland.

>”Families with highly educated mothers and families with less educated mothers are clearly moving in opposite directions,” Dr. Martin wrote in a paper that has not yet been published but has been presented and widely discussed at scientific meetings.

>As the overall divorce rates shot up from the early 1960’s through the late 1970’s, Dr. Martin found, the divorce rate for women with college degrees and those without moved in lockstep, with graduates consistently having about one-third to one-fourth the divorce rate of nongraduates.

>But since 1980, the two groups have taken diverging paths. Women without undergraduate degrees have remained at about the same rate, their risk of divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage hovering at around 35 percent. But for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 from 27 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979.

To a certain extent, for the upper middle class of certain age, the question “Is divorce bad?” is similar to the question “Are toy guns bad?”; it isn’t a matter of regression but of habitus.

Why people are still so commited to marriage and divorce? I’m probably just going to come off as a cliched academic elitest here, but cultural and anthropological evidence seems to suggest that one of the most varied parameters in human society are the norms concerning family. Sometimes the male would be equal partner to the female, and sometimes he wouldn’t even be present. Sometimes the child was exclusively the domain of the particular family, and other times it was the equal responsibilty of the whole community.

And more topically, the life long monogomous thread that has weaved its way through many societies still loses its unversality when compared to the tribes/cultures/whatever for whom sexual reproduction was simply a rather normal occurence, which demanded no extreme reorganization of the lives of the parents.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that I simply don’t buy into the idea that children being made aware that their parents love for each other is not, in fact, as eternal as the rising sun, need not be a life shattering experience. Certainly, it’ll probably be surprising, but unless the parents have been indoctrinating the kid into buying into their relationship as much as they did, I expect the child in question could take it with a good cry, and some well meaning TLC.

well to be devil’s advocate, divorce does create more liberals. single mothers with children are MUCH more likely to vote for the left. so are unmarried women in general (and men though not as much). so if one were interested in having the left regain political power, one would want more divorce.

so sure, it’s worse for the kids…but think about the greater good, people!