A call for more help on preventing breakups

Call it the Great Divorce Debate, focusing on this long-simmering question: Does divorce have lasting bad effects on children?

It should come as no surprise that new findings by E. Mavis Hetherington - which put a decidedly more positive spin on divorce than have earlier studies - are causing something of a stir. After all, her declaration that "the vast majority of people in our studies were coping reasonably well, both children and parents" would seem to defy the conventional wisdom.

She acknowledges that not all the news is good. Twenty-five percent of children in divorced families exhibit emotional, social, or psychological problems. That compares with 10 percent of children in intact families.

She concedes, too, that the first year after a divorce is "rough." Moreover, it can take as many as six years for everyone in the family to make the necessary adjustments.

But debate about her work, which was three decades in the making, is sparking comparisons with far more pessimistic findings - notably, those of Judith Wallerstein, a California psychologist who also has spent years studying the effects of divorce. Mrs. Wallerstein, for her part, maintains that children from divorced families have a hard time establishing healthy adult relationships.

Frank Pittman, a family therapist in Atlanta, sides with that view.

"I see all these children of divorce who are trying to make their own marriages work, when they never saw their parents' marriage work," he says. "So they keep their bags packed. They keep avoiding conflict, or looking for the betrayal. They don't trust that the relationship will work. As a result, their own marriages fail."

The divorce rate for children of divorce, he notes, is several times higher than it is for those who grow up in intact families.

Calling divorce a "high-risk situation," Hetherington emphasizes that she is not "pro-divorce." She warns that the breakup of a family should not be undertaken lightly. But she considers it a "reasonable solution" when a marital relationship is unhappy, acrimonious, or destructive.

Lori Gordon, founder of the PAIRS Foundation, which teaches relationship skills, agrees. A marriage in which the parents have recurring, open conflict in front of the children can have the same impact as a bad divorce, she says. "The worst thing is to stay in a miserable relationship where the tension is obvious, and where children walk on eggshells and then act out their feelings," says Mrs. Gordon.

The mother of four grown children, Gordon was divorced after 17 years of marriage. She is happily remarried. Divorce, she insists, can have positive effects on children. Explaining that her former husband took little interest in their children, she says, "Because my children did not have the father they wanted, [now that they are grown] they are intensely involved with their children. They are wonderful parents."

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