Clinical Social Work Journal, Vol. 33, No.

4, Winter 2005 (Ó 2005)

DOI: 10.1007/s10615-005-7034-y

GROWING UP IN THE DIVORCED FAMILY

Judith S. Wallerstein, Ph.D.1,2

ABSTRACT: Stressful parent–child relationships in the post-divorce family

together with the enduring effects of the troubled marriage and breakup lead to
the acute anxieties about love and commitment that many children of divorce
bring to relationships in their adult years. Findings from a 25-year study of 131
children call for a paradigmatic change in our theoretical understanding and in
our interventions with these youngsters as children and as adults. Revised
clinical and educational strategies with parents and children are proposed.

KEY WORDS: divorce; children; adult children of divorce; long-term effects.

GROWING UP IN THE DIVORCED FAMILY

I begin with a favorite quote from a distinguished family judge.

Rosemary Pfeiffer of the San Mateo Court in Northern California, in
an address to the Family Court Services Regional Conference in 1985,
told us, ‘‘If one were to use situation comedies as an analogy for our
work with families, then the long running show M.A.S.H. would be my
choice. Like the legendary M.A.S.H. unit, our lives in both a profes-
sional and a personal sense are marked by drama, comedy, and trag-
edy. We live our lives within a frontline emergency situation, in which
1
Judith S. Wallerstein holds a Masters Degree in Social Work, a PhD in Psychology,
and training in Child Psychoanalysis. Her research on the effects of divorce on children is
known nationally and internationally. Her four best selling books have been translated into
more than 10 languages. She is Founder of the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in
Transition, a non-profit research, counseling, and educational center in Northern Califor-
nia. She is Senior Lecturer Emerita at the University of California at Berkeley School of
Social Welfare, where she taught clinical courses on children and families for 26 years.
2
Correspondence should be directed to Judith S. Wallerstein, Ph.D., Berkeley School of
Law, New York; e-mail: judywall@mindspring.com.

401 Ó 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

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we are called upon without adequate preparation or sufficient notice to

diagnosis injuries and to treat traumas. We bandage the wounded, we
give them all the support and rehabilitation that we can call up, based
on our own resources, and we send them on their way. The difference
of course is that the injuries and trauma which we deal with are those
injuries and traumas to the heart.’’
The judge’s poignant words converge with the moving testimony of
Joanne, a child of divorce. Like so many other communications, mostly
via e-mail, that I have received since the publication of The Unexpected
Legacy of Divorce (Wallerstein, Lewis, & Blakeslee, 2000), Joanne’s
message to me was welcomed but entirely unexpected. She explained
that she was 20-years-old and still struggling very hard with her
parents’ divorce, which jolted her seemingly tranquil world when she
was 15. ‘‘I read your books,’’ she wrote, ‘‘and all that you said struck
home. It’s like you had met me and reported my story and my feelings.
You validated what I experienced. And I felt comforted. As if you had
been there with me.’’
She went on to say, ‘‘I remember the day my mom and dad told us
that they had decided to divorce, as if it was yesterday. The sky was
overcast. The house looked gray. It was surreal. I retreated into my
own mind as it spun out of control, imagining all the milestones that
we would encounter as a broken family. Tears were streaming down
my face, but I felt that I needed to take charge and correct the situa-
tion. There is no way, I told myself, that this is not going to happen.
‘‘It’s already happening,’’ my dad said, as if he were reading my
thoughts, ‘‘so accept the reality.’’ So there we were, three crying
children with no say, and one very sad and one uncomfortable parent.
‘‘Today, I still find myself thinking a lot about my folks’ divorce
even though my folks are 3000 miles away and it’s 5 years ago. I enjoy
college, but I never can escape that part of my past, as it shapes so
many of my beliefs and reactions to the world today. It baffles me that
my sentiments are still so tender almost 5 years later. It’s a door I
can’t close. But I felt it was only me, and something was wrong with
me, until I read your books.’’
Joanne’s statement that she cannot close the door on her parents’
divorce and that it continues to shape many of her beliefs and reactions
to the world converges with the concern of the judge and the concerns of
many clinicians who work with divorced and remarried families. Both
the legal and the clinical disciplines have at long last recognized that we
are in new territory and how much we need to work together to improve
our understanding and our psychological and legal interventions. The
books of mine that Joanne found so congenial to her own experience, as
have so many thousands of adult children of divorce, portrayed the inner
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lives and experiences of a group of 131 children and their parents from
the time of the family’s marital breakup until the children reached full
adulthood (Wallerstein & Blakeslee, 1989; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980;
Wallerstein et al., 2000). These books comprise the first and only such
report that tells the story of ‘‘growing up divorced’’ in American society
through the eyes those who lived it. When we first met the young partici-
pants of our study, they were between the ages of 3 and 18. Initially,
they were seen at the separation and well before the legal divorce, then
again at 18 months, 5, 10, 15, and 25 years afterwards.
Today, these adult children of divorce are 28–43-years-old. Their
parents divorced during the first wave of the divorce revolution of the
early 1970s, when the national divorce rate began its steep rise. These
children are the vanguard of an army of adults from divorced families,
who currently make up one quarter of the American population now in
their twenties, thirties, and forties. This high number is not surprising,
as the divorce rate has been hovering at close to one half of all first mar-
riages and 60% of second marriages, for the past several decades. What
is less well known is that the majority of couples divorcing in the 1990s
had a child age 6 or under at the time of the breakup (Maccoby & Mnoo-
kin, 1992). These youngsters spend the bulk of their growing-up years in
post-divorce families, trying to cope with a range of changing relation-
ships of one or both parents including cohabitations and remarriages.
Their losses will be compounded by their parents’ broken love affairs,
second or even third divorces, and by the several years of diminished
parenting that are inevitable as both parents struggle to rebuild their
lives and recapture their hope of achieving a rewarding and lasting life
partnership. These children are the invisible clients in our divorce pro-
ceedings, and their lives are the ones most influenced by a proceeding in
which they have no standing and only feeble voices usually ignored.
As children and as young adults they, as well as their parents, make
up a large segment of our patients. Although we have no figures repre-
senting their presence in private clinical practice, children of divorce,
including those in their parents’ second marriages, are three times as
likely as children from intact families to be referred for psychological
help by teachers (Zill & Schoenborn, 1988). Drug, alcohol abuse, and sex-
ual activity start significantly earlier for them than for adolescents from
intact families (Amato & Keith, 1991; McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994;
Resnick, 1997). As adults they marry less and divorce significantly more
than adults raised in intact families (Amato & DeBoer, 2001; Cherlin,
Kiernan, & Chase-Lansdale, 1995). Additionally, they show a range of
psychological difficulties in adulthood that have been reported in several
long-term studies (Cherlin et al., 1995; Hetherington & Kelly, 2002;
Wallerstein et al., 2000).
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The child who is raised in the divorced or remarried family grows

to adulthood in a different culture from the child raised in an intact
family. The divorced family is a new kind of family with an inherently
unstable structure and by no means just a truncated version of the
traditional family that we know. Both the courts and the clinical pro-
fessions, including psychoanalysts, have been slow to recognize the
distinctiveness of this population. We and they have relied on blue-
prints borrowed from our knowledge of the relatively stable intact
family for our understanding and for our legal and psychological efforts
to help. Thus we have located our major interventions at the time of
the breakup in full denial of the long-term process of divorce and its
continuing challenges for the child. We have clung as well to the equal-
ly unrealistic notion that if we can establish conditions such as cooper-
ation between the divorced parents and contact with both parents,
which approximate those of the intact well-functioning two-parent
family, then the children will be protected during the long years that
follow.

THE CHILD’S EXPERIENCE IN THE DIVORCED FAMILY

To review briefly, psychoanalytic formulations about psychological

development in childhood evolved within the paradigm of a stable
intact family of the early twentieth century, within which the child
could be expected to traverse the developmental stages in clear and
measured sequences. In this archival book of childhood development
and attachment theory, the continued presence of both parents during
the child’s early years was a given except for such involuntary disrup-
tions as death or severe illness. When the child’s developmental path-
way was skewed or blocked, the prevailing view of both Anna Freud
and Melanie Klein and their respective followers, who founded psycho-
analytic psychotherapy as we know it, was that the problems were
likely the result of the child’s difficulty in resolving inner conflicts, and
consequently psychotherapeutic intervention was indicated. It was
assumed that both concerned parents would cooperate with the analyst
on behalf of their child and would, where indicated, seek treatment for
themselves. What a comforting vision!
Today the very notion of an average expectable family seems
ironic, even absurd. Relationships that include the visiting parent, or
joint custody, or live-in lovers, or stepparents and stepsiblings, or sec-
ond divorces and their effects on attachment and development, have no
counterpart in the intact family. Moreover, it is not only the family
structure that changes with divorce or remarriage. What is striking is
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that the entire patterning of conscious and unconscious psychological

needs, wishes, and expectations that parents and children bring to
each other is profoundly altered under the impact of divorce and its
multiple ripple effects (Wallerstein & Resnikoff, 1997).
It is important to understand at the outset that the agenda of the
divorced parent who seeks to rebuild his or her social, sexual, and eco-
nomic life is out of sync with the needs of the child, especially the
young child, for the kind of supportive parenting that requires time,
constant attention, and sacrifice. Indeed, the loss of the ex-spouse’s
presence often gives rise to an intense dependence by the adult on the
child, which is at odds with our expectation of the child’s dependence
on the parent. This reversal of roles can readily translate into the
adult’s temporary or lasting inability to distinguish his or her own
needs and wishes from those that are attributed to the child. Following
the divorce, parents often find they need the child to fill their own
emptiness, to ward off depression, to give purpose to their lives, to give
them the courage to go on. ‘‘All weekend when my daughter is with
her dad, I pace restlessly from lonely room to lonely room trying to
ward off a depression that threatens to engulf me,’’ I was told by a
35-year-old divorced mother. Consciously or unconsciously, parents in
crisis turn to the child as surrogate spouse, confidante, advisor, sibling,
parent, caretaker, ally within the marital wars, or as extended con-
science and ego control. The child at divorce has an extraordinary
capacity to restore the parent’s shaken self-image. Even very young
children are pressed into this role: ‘‘He understands everything I say,’’
declared the successful businessman of his 3-year-old son. ‘‘Sometimes
I talk to him for hours.’’ In our playroom, this same child, during the
course of a conversation about his father, repeatedly pretended that he
was a little car being run over by a Mack truck—a strikingly different
take on this relationship.
Interviews with the parent in the attorney’s office do not reveal
these strange topsy–turvy parent–child relationships, which all too
often govern the adult’s plans for the child. Alternately or sometimes
at the same time, we also observe a powerful conscious or unconscious
wish by the parent to reclaim their lost years, to abandon their chil-
dren, and to wipe out all reminders of the betrayal and bitter disap-
pointments of the marriage as if they had never happened. ‘‘If I had
my way, I would take my youngest child and walk out and keep on
walking,’’ said the mother of three. The passionate need for the child’s
presence, the wish to escape, and the defense against that forbidden
impulse to run away and start anew, all underlie many of the fierce
fights over custody which the court, the attorney, and the mediator
typically see as reflecting anger at the other parent.
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Of course, anger exists as well in its own right and as a defense

against depression. At its psychotic fringes, all reason may be lost in
the effort to destroy the former spouse, who is regarded as the agent of
the intolerable narcissistic injury of the breakup (Johnston, 1994). The
parents’ suffering combined with their flawed reality testing sets the
mundane agenda of much litigation, and while it may take two to
tango, it takes only one to attack or to litigate. Unfortunately, these
irrational behaviors do not yield to rational processes like mediation or
court trials or parent education. They require highly specialized clini-
cal interventions and a close working relationship with a psychologi-
cally sophisticated court. Such programs are not yet available
(Johnston, 1994; Johnston & Campbell, 1988).
Parent–child relationships not only change at the breakup but con-
tinue to change during the years that follow. In all families, the
parent–child relationships are dynamically embedded in the parents’
union. A stable marital bond has a powerful capacity to support and
stabilize each parent’s relationship with the child. When this bond is
broken by divorce, a wide range of passions spill over into all domains
of the family. These emotions, as noted, have the power to derail par-
ent–child relationships that were in place during the intact family.
But, beyond the immediate changes, the relationship with the child
will change during subsequent years, with a love affair, with a new
marriage, with a second or third divorce, and of course with career and
work demands and changed financial pressures. Several fathers told
me of years when they did not visit their children because they were
not feeling well physically or emotionally, or even financially. ‘‘I had
nothing to offer them,’’ they reported. It is also true that a passionate
love affair or exciting sexual relationship can trump a parent–child
relationship and push it to the periphery of attention. And of course
the influence of a stepparent on the parent’s relationships with the
children of the first marriage is powerful and unpredictable. Many a
stepmother has told me, ‘‘I’m ashamed to say this, but I wanted the
man, not the kids.’’
One immediate consequence of these chronic uncertainties in the
post-divorce family is the eruption of persistent anxiety in the child,
setting into motion a hypervigilant tracking of each parent. Simply sta-
ted, despite the passionate fights for custody and tussles over visiting
arrangements at the breakup, children who grow up in divorced homes
typically feel insecure. They worry about another loss or sudden
change in their family or household. They worry for many years about
their parents’ well-being. ‘‘Will my mom jump over the Golden Gate
Bridge?’’ asked one 10-year-old. ‘‘Will my dad die if he doesn’t
quit smoking?’’ asked another. Unfortunately, children’s feelings of
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insecurity and powerlessness have often been compounded in recent

years by courts, which, heedless of a child’s special need for a secure,
stable home, and unresponsive to the child’s bonding with the custodial
parent, or her preferences and concerns, have not hesitated to remove
the child from the home of one parent and place her with the other, on
the rising tide of accusations of enmeshment or alienation, or following
a custodial parent’s need to relocate to be with her new husband, or
following a child’s reluctance to visit a parent who is overbearing,
needy, or inattentive, or whose demands violate the child’s sense of
morality.
I am reminded of the 12-year-old who refused to visit her father
because he ordered her to hunt birds with him during her visits. The
child, who suffered with nightmares of dying birds and felt strongly
that hunting birds was immoral, was shackled and interned by the Illi-
nois judge for objecting to continued visits. What is striking in this
case, beyond the insensitivity of the judge towards the hapless child,
was the fact that the judge’s position was not overruled by the higher
court. As I suggested to the Chief Justices of the 50 States, whom I
was invited to address at their annual meeting in Rapid City, South
Dakota, in July 2000, the life of such a child might go either way: she
might grow up to become a wiser, more compassionate judge herself, or
she might turn her back on a society that betrayed her (Wallerstein,
2002).
Children grow up more quickly in divorced and remarried families.
They have to. Having been forced to stand between their two worlds
and to examine each carefully in their lifelong efforts to understand
the events that changed their lives, they are often more independent in
their thinking than children in intact homes. Often, they have had to
take responsibility for themselves and for their siblings as well. More-
over, the distance between the child’s role and the parent’s role is
diminished as both share in running the household, including concerns
about money.
Typically, children have their own point of view about their fam-
ily and about what went wrong. They reject the pale, often platitudi-
nous ‘‘Bambi-like’’ explanations that parents and many clinicians
advise for the breakup. They fill in the gaps with their own explana-
tions: ‘‘My parents lied and cheated on each other,’’ an 11-year-old
told me. ‘‘I have decided to tell the truth.’’ Sometimes they sound
wise beyond their years. ‘‘My father is a smart man, he knows a lot,
and he has a great sense of humor. But he has never made sacrifices
for anyone in his life,’’ one adolescent boy told me. Commenting on
the reasons for her parents’ divorce, a 15-year-old said, with simple
eloquence, ‘‘They each gave too little and asked too much.’’ Although
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children were sometimes drawn to side with one parent against the
other, these alliances were short-lived and did not last through the
adolescent years. The notion that children are puppets who mind-
lessly join the assault of one parent against the other does not hold
up in our work.
Through all their growing-up years, children can be intensely and
painfully aware, sometimes haunted, by disparities in the post-divorce
well-being of their parents. They are moved by love and compassion to
want to take care of the more suffering parent. It is especially difficult
for adult daughters to leave their lonely mothers, and many are
consumed with guilt when they do so. Often they blame the more suc-
cessful parent for the troubled parent’s unhappy state. The passionate
loyalty of children to a needy parent is deeply touching. ‘‘How many
volts are in that wire?’’ asked a 9-year-old, suddenly, while out riding
with his alcoholic father, who had enlisted his help to restore the mar-
riage. ‘‘I would hold that wire for you,’’ said the child. ‘‘Dad, I would
die for you.’’
Many adolescents are very angry at the court order and the
parents that lock them into a custody or visiting schedule that in-
trudes on their social lives. As I have reported in an earlier publication
(Wallerstein et al., 2000), the children who were ordered against their
wishes to visit a parent at frequent intervals and were required to do
so over their strong objections during adolescence, rejected that parent
as soon as they reached their majority. If the purpose of court-ordered
visiting is to enable child and parent to get to know each other and
enjoy a friendly, even loving relationship, that strategy has boomer-
anged badly. Parents cannot rely on the power of the courts to create a
loving or enduring relationship with a child. It might be very helpful if
parents were informed by their attorneys that rejection by the young
person when he reaches the age of 18 might well be the harvest of a
rigid enforcement of an unwelcome schedule with the adolescent
youngster. For parents who look forward, as they age, to the love and
support of their children, this would be a very important message for
them to hear.
On the encouraging side, parents who reappeared after several
years of absence or neglect and were financially helpful and emotion-
ally available to their young adult children were welcomed. One young
woman told me, ‘‘He was a terrible father. We were starving and he
had plenty. But he is a wonderful grandfather. I told him, ‘I cannot
forgive you for the past but I love you now.’ ’’
Overall, the children of divorce in our study reported significantly
less playtime and far less participation in extracurricular activities
such as sports or music or other enrichment programs than those in
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intact families. This was usually due to interruptions in team sports

schedules and other activities because of visiting and custody arrange-
ments, as well as less money to pay for such activities, and less avail-
ability of parents to routinely transport the child or to attend events.
When custody and visiting plans are drawn up, the lack of consider-
ation for the child’s interests, and preferences as to how she wishes to
spend her time separate from her parents, can be quite striking. The
child’s time is divided between Mom and Dad as if the child herself has
disappeared from the equation and become mere property. The result
is often heartbreaking for the child. As one sad little 7-year-old in joint
custody explained to me, ‘‘My coach said, ‘Son, you’re a really good
pitcher, but you have to be here if you want to pitch!’ ’’
We found that although children in joint custody gained more con-
tact with both parents, they suffered greater losses in peer activities
and friendships than those in sole custody. As one boy put it, ‘‘Kids
don’t keep ‘pointment books. They [his friends] forget that I am coming
and I don’t get invited to lots of stuff.’’ Many children have expressed
what one child poignantly said to me, ‘‘The day they divorced was the
day my childhood ended.’’ These are important issues because, over the
years, children who were able to draw support from school, sport
teams, grandparents, teachers, and coaches, or from their own hobbies
and talents, had happier childhoods and brought greater social matu-
rity and a richer background of interests to adulthood.

THE LONG-TERM EFFECTS OF DIVORCE

I turn now to our findings on the long-term effects of divorce. Our

findings are in accord with the very few other studies that have
followed the course of children of divorce from childhood to adulthood,
although our methods have differed significantly. In a full-scale review
of a longitudinal survey over the 1990s, Amato (2000) noted that
adults and children score lower than their counterparts in married-
couple families on a variety of indicators of well-being. He found that
adults raised in divorced families suffered from a deficit in social skills
and had special problems in handling conflicts within their own mar-
riages. Cherlin and his colleagues drew their divorce population from a
public health study in the United Kingdom begun in 1958 (Cherlin,
Chase-Lansdale, & McRae, 1988; Cherlin et al., 1995). Although they
found that many of the children’s difficulties were evident prior to
the divorce, their most recent work (Cherlin et al., 1995) showed that
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subjects from divorced families were experiencing serious psychological

difficulties after they reached adulthood which had not been foreseen.
Both Amato and Cherlin relied on structured questionnaires directed
to one parent and teachers, and to symptom lists to establish psycho-
pathology in lieu of clinical assessment and personal contact with the
child who was being evaluated. Their data collection did not include
any interviews with children. Hetherington (Hetherington & Kelly,
2002), studied 900 youths from intact, divorced, and remarried families
using a wide range of research methods including videos, psychological
tests and structured interviews with children, parents, and teachers.
She reported that 20–25% of the children were psychiatrically troubled
adults as compared with 10% of those raised in intact families.
Although the media hailed this as good news, Hetherington herself
noted that this percentage is greater than the association between
smoking and cancer (Hetherington, 2002).
In the longitudinal study that my colleagues and I conducted, we
relied primarily on many hours of in-depth interviews over a 25-year
period, with the children and both parents, to tap the inner experience
and relationships of the children as they grew to adulthood. At the 25-
year mark, we recruited a comparison group of people in the same age
group as our subjects, who had grown up in intact families in the same
neighborhoods and attended the same schools. Although we found
many similarities in the marital relationships among the divorced and
intact couples, the life experiences of the children were strikingly
different (Wallerstein et al., 2000).
The central finding of our study is that, at adulthood, the expe-
rience of having been through parental divorce as a child impacts
detrimentally on the capacity to love and be loved within a lasting,
committed relationship. At young adulthood when love, sexual inti-
macy, commitment and marriage take center stage, children of
divorce are haunted by the ghosts of their parents’ divorce and terri-
fied that the same fate awaits them. These fears, which crescendo at
young adulthood, impede their developmental progress into full
adulthood. Many eventually overcome their fears, but the struggle to
do so is painful and can consume a decade or more of their lives. In
addition to overcoming their fear of failure, they have a great deal
to learn about the give and take of intimate living with another per-
son, about how to deal with differences, and how to resolve conflicts.
This is knowledge that other children acquire from growing up with
both parents and learning from them how to negotiate the inevitable
ebb and flow of marital life. As our study ended, 60% of the women
and 40% of the men had been able to establish reasonably gratifying
and enduring relationships that included a satisfying sexual
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relationship. Close to 40% had opted for parenthood. But the

remainder were still in limbo. A good number enjoyed successful ca-
reers but suffered with severe loneliness. Since most of these people
were still in their mid thirties, the book is not closed on their lives.
One third of the men and women were openly pessimistic about
marriage and divorce, and sought to avoid both. ‘‘If you don’t marry,
then you don’t divorce,’’ was their mantra. But the majority were
eager, even desperate for a lasting relationship and fearful that they
would never achieve it. They did not want the lives their parents led.
Their message was clear: ‘‘My parents’ divorce is still incomprehensible
to me. They met in college. They fell in love. They were compatible in
their tastes and values. So, what is to keep the same fate from happen-
ing to me?’’ Over and over, they told us, ‘‘I’d love to get married, but
I’m sure that I’d jinx it.’’ Or, ‘‘Any relationship I’m in will dissolve.’’
Even being in love and living for years in a reasonably harmonious
relationship did not mute their fears of commitment. One man told us,
‘‘We have been living together for 4 years. She brought love and laugh-
ter into my life. I can’t imagine being with anyone else. But every time
she brings up marriage, I feel this great sadness welling inside of me.
That was exactly the way I felt when I was 7-years-old, when my folks
split up.’’ People in apparently stable, satisfactory marriages and rela-
tionships had a sense of unease, a strong foreboding that their happi-
ness might be short lived, that they somehow didn’t deserve to be in a
happy, long-lasting union. They were particularly helpless in dealing
with conflict. Any argument or even difference of opinion in a close
relationship represented the dreaded slippery slope. Their first
response was panic followed by the urge to flee, which they often did.
Their continued fear of sudden loss tied in with a widespread severe
symptom, which they failed to identify as such. They told us that they
were afraid that if they went to bed happy, the source of their happi-
ness, whether a great marriage or a beloved child, would be gone by
morning. This they called ‘‘the fear of the second shoe dropping.’’ What
is so devastating about this symptom to the individual who lives with
it is that the happier she feels, the greater the threat of sudden loss.
They complained that they were unprepared for marriage. ‘‘I’ve
never seen a man and a woman on the same beam.’’ ‘‘Sometimes I feel
that I have been raised on a desert island. Combining love with sexual
intimacy is a strange idea to me.’’ Most regarded their parents’ divorce
as representing the failure to achieve one of the most important of life’s
tasks, even though many acknowledged that their parents had little in
common and wondered why they had ever married. They complained
about their parents’ ineptness in personal relationships. ‘‘My mom never
taught me about men. She didn’t know anything.’’ Asked whether they
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would consult their fathers, they answered, yes, about business, but
never about a personal problem. ‘‘I learned from my dad how not to par-
ent,’’ said one man, expecting his first child. ‘‘Is that enough?’’ I asked.
‘‘That’s all I have. It will have to do,’’ was the grim reply.
Their despair led them to search for love in strange places, to
make impulsive destructive choices, to hang on for years to exploit-
ative partners, to hide their search for love behind promiscuity, to
accept whoever volunteered to move in; or to avoid intimate contact
altogether and to refer to themselves well into their forties as ‘‘a
child of divorce,’’ as if this were a fixed identity that defined them
forevermore.
Men and women reacted differently to their fears. Men were more
likely to withdraw from involvement. A significant number of the
young men avoided relationships altogether. As the study ended, 42%
of the men were unmarried compared to only 6% in the comparison
group. Half of the unmarried men in the divorce group led sad, isolated
lives. The remainder cohabited in one or many relationships. One
young man went so far as to teach himself to go without dinner so he
could avoid the misery of eating alone. Another group of men were
inordinately hurt by the failure of a first love affair and withdrew from
the dating scene for years thereafter. Many were astonishingly passive
in their relationships with women and clueless in responding to the
woman’s wishes or complaints when they lived together, until the
women stormed out in a towering rage.
By contrast, very few of the women were alone. The dominant
pattern was that they jumped headlong, counterphobically, into rela-
tionships, often with men they hardly knew, or with men in need of
rescue. A subgroup of more than 20 women from the divorce group
sought out multiple lovers. Many of these women, by their own
admission, felt compelled to attract, conquer, reject, and quickly
move on. As one woman said, ‘‘I wanted to be powerful, like a man.’’
One woman admitted to having had one-night stands with over 50
men during her 3 years at graduate school. Their sexual encounters
seemed driven by rage at men, which their current close relation-
ships with their fathers did not seem to mute. Many told us that
when they were with a man they did not care for, they enjoyed the
sex, but that if they really liked or loved the man, they froze. As
one young woman said, ‘‘It’s not sex I’m afraid of, it’s getting close
that scares me.’’ Some very attractive, very young women accepted
the first marriage offer they received, whatever the man’s attributes.
When asked why they had married, they replied, ‘‘I was afraid no
one else would ever ask me.’’ In one such instance, the 23-year-old
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attractive woman turned to a man she hardly knew, on their second

date, and said, ‘‘Marry me. It’s my birthday.’’
One finding that has special clinical implications was that over half
of our subjects reported memory fragments and flashbacks which cap-
tured key moments of the family breakup or incidents from the years
that followed. These images reflected the suffering of the parent which
the child had perceived and internalized when she was very young. The
rawness of the parental suffering following the breakup left an indelible
emotional mark. One young woman explained why she remained for
5 years with a college boyfriend who was very attached to her but with
whom she felt she had nothing in common. She said, ‘‘I could never do to
another human being what my mother did to my father.’’
Another woman, in her thirties, told us that her strongest memory
of her parents’ divorce was of her father sobbing as he walked slowly
down the flower-bordered path away from the family home, after her
mom threw him out because of his infidelity. This memory flashed
before her eyes whenever she contemplated leaving her alcoholic boy-
friend. By her account, the man’s tears brought back the image of her
crying father, and she was unable to break the relationship. More than
half of our subjects carried similar memory fragments, which intruded
powerfully into their adult relationships at moments of crisis.
By contrast with the anxieties of the young adults from divorced
families, members of the comparison group, even those raised in disap-
pointing but intact marriages, were confident that sooner or later they
would meet the right person and enter into a satisfying, committed
relationship, usually involving marriage. ‘‘I never doubted I’d marry
and have a family’’ was a typical comment. They expected ups and
downs in their relationships. One young man told me, ‘‘When I was
9-years-old, my mom had an affair, and I was afraid that they would
divorce. But I learned from my dad that anything worth having was
worth fighting for.’’ This group did not expect to fail, if they chose care-
fully. The issue of careful choice of partner, which was so baffling to
the children of divorce, was where the comparison group told us they
put their greatest efforts. Their confidence that things would eventu-
ally work out well also enabled most to bide their time. Often, they
drew consciously on their family of origin to decide what they wanted
or did not want. ‘‘I didn’t want a volatile lady like my mom,’’ said one
young man. Many mentioned that they wanted someone who would be
a good parent to their children. Asked how she chose her husband, one
woman laughingly answered, ‘‘Besides his being devastatingly good
looking, you mean? I wanted someone who wasn’t too serious, who
would treat me well, who would be a good father, and someone I’d like
to wake up with 50 years later.’’ This conscious way of thinking, which
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came easily to many of those raised in the intact homes, would have
been incomprehensible to the women in the divorce sample.
In keeping with the attention that has been focused in recent
years on father–child relationships, we reported that, at the 25-year
mark, one-third of the children had seen their fathers weekly during
their childhood and with some regularity during their adulthood. Oth-
ers who saw their fathers frequently as children had little contact as
adults. This drop-off of contact at adulthood, especially among the
boys, was striking by comparison with fathers and sons in the intact-
family group, many of whom grew closer to the father after he retired.
Of those who maintained frequent contact with their father after the
divorce, several lived in his home for a year or more during their child-
hood or adolescence. A number worked in their father’s business and
saw him daily over many years. Yet, these young people did not show
any less anxiety about love and commitment than those who saw their
father less frequently or hardly at all. Actually, the father’s influence
often was evident in the child’s career choice, but not in their under-
standing or trust in relationships. Thus, one young woman who
became a dedicated environmental attorney attributed her career
choice to her father’s ardent support of conservation activities, which
she had shared with him as a child and as an adolescent. At age 30,
however, she described being involved in multiple relationships that
lasted an average of 6 months and of experiencing sexual frigidity if
she liked the man.
Less than 10% of the children were in psychotherapy during
their growing-up years in marked contrast to their parents, many of
whom had been in therapy, including psychoanalysis, for years.
Several of these children were referred by us because of our serious
concern over their suicidal ideation or acute depression. Their mostly
middle class or affluent parents had not been aware of the serious-
ness of their distress or were preoccupied with rebuilding their own
lives.
Of the one-third of the children who entered therapy as adults,
their agenda was their worry about failing in adult relationships.
One half found the therapy experience very helpful. Those who left
complained about the passivity or coldness of the therapist. They
needed someone who would reach out to help overcome their fears.
Those who had benefited from psychotherapy delayed marriage until
they were in their thirties. They had experienced several failed rela-
tionships during their twenties and appeared to have learned to
choose more carefully and with greater self-confidence. Several were
rescued by stable spouses who were generous and loving. One woman
told me, ‘‘I tried with every trick I knew to drive him away, like I
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always did, but he said, ‘Lady, forget it. I’m here to stay.’ ’’ She
smiled at the memory. ‘‘That was 10 years and two children ago.’’
Those who succeeded in therapy had been able finally to loosen their
ties to their parents and to gain the emotional distance to free them-
selves from the conviction that the failure of their own relationships
was inevitable.

CONCLUSIONS

The findings from this study call for a shift in our dominant para-
digm of understanding the impact of divorce on children and in the
interventions that have been developed to mitigate its effects. The
widely accepted premise has been that divorce represents an acute
crisis from which resilient children recover, typically within a 2-year
period, and then resume their normal developmental progress, if three
conditions obtain: (1) the parents are able to settle their differences
without fighting; (2) the financial arrangements are fair; and (3) the
child has continued contact with both parents over the years that fol-
low. Implicit in this model is the notion that, after the turmoil of the
divorce, the parent–child relationships return to the status quo ante;
parenting resumes much as it was before the split, and the child con-
tinues to do well, or even better, minus the pre-divorce marital conflict.
A parallel paradigm has placed loss at the center of the divorce for
the child. With loss in mind, it has been proposed that the hazard to
the child is primarily the loss of one parent, usually the father. It is
held in this view that the child will be protected against long-term
problems if continued contact with both parents is assured.
Our findings are that where parents got along and both main-
tained caring relationships with their children of the first marriage,
undiminished by their post-divorce relationships, and where both par-
ents were doing reasonably well in their personal lives, the childhood
and adolescence of the children were better protected. But we report
that a civil or even cooperative relationship between the parents did
not shield the children from suffering intense anxiety and fear of fail-
ure in love and marriage when they reached late adolescence and
young adulthood.
Similarly, remaining in frequent contact with both parents may
have eased childhood years if their playtime and peer relationships
were protected. But it did not reduce their suffering in adulthood,
especially if the condition of the parents was discrepant and one parent
was lonely and unhappy. On a happier note, those children who were
raised in second marriages that were gratifying to both parents and
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who felt fully integrated within these second marriages, came to adult-
hood with far greater confidence in themselves and their future family.
In my new book, (Wallerstein, & Blakeslee, 2003), I spell out a
range of interventions for parents and clinicians that derive from these
findings. I have already noted my concern that refusing the child a
seat at the table when setting custody and visiting schedules and fail-
ing to recognize the importance of the child’s priorities, increases her
sense of her own powerlessness and contributes to her anger and low
self esteem in adulthood. I recommend that custody and visiting agree-
ments be reviewed and revised regularly so that they can continue to
fit the growing child. The failure of the legal system to acknowledge
the child’s changing developmental requirements and the omission of
the child as a participant in planning her own life as she matures is
hard to justify. It is as if we ordered the child at age 12 to wear the
shoes that fit her when she was 6, and when the child complained that
the shoes pinched or cried as she began to limp and eventually could
not walk at all, her objections were turned aside because of the zealous
upholding of plans negotiated at the breakup when she was a little
girl. Additionally, I question the current advice to parents that they
refrain from talking frankly with their children about the causes for
the divorce. Of course, explanations need to be adapted to the child’s
level of development and comprehension. But the parents’ silences
about the breakup and about each other has led latency children and
adolescents to preoccupation with the terrible family secret which they
interpret as too dreadful to mention. Silence led, as well, to anger in
adulthood at parents who were accused by them of withholding a vital
part of their history. If we wish to mute the long-term effects of the
parental divorce and the intergenerational transmission of divorce that
we report, it is important that the adolescent understand the mistakes
that the parents made so that the youngster can be encouraged to ben-
efit from that knowledge when establishing their own relationships.
Adolescents need the opportunity to understand the formative events
in their history. Many also need from parents the express permission
to enjoy relationships which their parents failed to achieve. Parents
who choose divorce, and those who advise them, have the additional
responsibility, painful as it may be, of preparing their children for
adult love, commitment, and family.
It also appears that parents who spend thousands of dollars on
legal fees to fight over the merits of joint or sole custody for their chil-
dren are wasting their money. The passions of the litigation are not
conducive to cooperation on behalf of the children and are more likely
to leave bitterness and lasting hurt in their wake. No model of custody,
no axiom of time sharing, no principle of greater access governs how
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well children do after their parents’ divorce or modifies their anxiety

when they achieve young adulthood. Joint custody can work well or
poorly for the child. It can be beneficial at one developmental stage and
harmful or a burden for the same child at another stage. The same is
true of sole custody. But custody has little to do with the long-term
effects of divorce (Kline, Tschann, Johnston, & Wallerstein, 1989).
Finally, the difficulties that I have described did not show up in
the workplace. Many of the skills that enabled these young people to
navigate their way between divided parents served them well in busi-
ness and professional life. As one 36-year-old attorney told me, ‘‘There
is another side to being a child of divorce. The divorce made me inde-
pendent. I deal well with adversity. I’m a good diplomat. I had to be.
I’m good at working with difficult people and I’m willing to take risks.
Because my parents disagreed, I had to think for myself and figure out
my own values. I had to be my own parent. I had to create my own
way in the world.’’
The responsible and often successful ways that adult children of
divorce function in the workplace as compared with the serious difficul-
ties that they encounter in their intimate relationships has made it
impossible to assign one outcome measure. This striking discrepancy in
functioning in the different domains of life, as well as the different
methodologies employed by various researchers, account for some of
the differences among studies reporting the adjustment of these adult
children of divorce. What emerges clearly is the need for psychological
help that so many young adults from divorced families experience
when they confront the challenges of marriage and parenthood.

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Judith S. Wallerstein, Ph.D.

University of California
Berkeley School of Social Welfare
New York
judywall@mindspring.com