What About the Kids? Raising Your Children Before, During, and After Divorce

Abstract

JUDITH S. WALLERSTEIN AND SANDRA BLAKESLEE: What About the Kids? Raising Your Children Before, During, and After Divorce. New York: Hyperion, 2003, 400 pp., $23.95, ISBN 0786868651 For more than thirty years, Judith S. Wallerstein, Ph.D., has studied the impact of divorce on families. As founder and executive director of the Center for the Family in Transition, she has conducted extensive follow-up work with parents, children, and adolescents affected by divorce as they have continued throughout life in the post-divorce phase. Her method has focused on the personal interview: a faith in the power of individual stories. Students of divorce know her groundbreaking work from her previous books, second Chances: Men, Women, and Children a Decade after Divorce (with Sandra Blakeslee, a science writer and her co-author here); The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study (with Blakeslee and Julia M. Lewis); and Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope with Divorce (with Joan Berlin Kelly). She also has written, with Blakeslee, The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts, a fascinating exploration of successful marriage. Written in the second person, What About the Kids? addresses parents specifically. This book, unique in its perspective, focuses on the psychological impact of divorce on children and adolescents. It offers to parents invaluable, practical information and specific recommendations. Wallerstein and Blakeslee note that divorcing or divorced parents have greater responsibilities for raising their children, while they have far less control individually. Further, one parent is never completely free from the other-a point that cannot be overemphasized to spouses who are contemplating divorce. One of the most important hurdles for parents is their discussion with their children prior to any actual separation. Children younger than five may need only a day or so of preparation. Adolescents, who often sense what is happening, may need a few weeks. Years later, children of divorce often are able to remember every word of these conversations. The authors caution against what they call the real estate approach to divorce, where parents focus exclusively on changes in the child's living arrangements. Parents should take nothing for granted in a child's understanding of the meaning of divorce. Obviously, age, developmental level, gender, and temperament will influence this understanding. The book explores specific responses and concerns of children at different ages. For example, very young children are often preoccupied with separation-if one parent can leave, why not both? Of note, half of all divorces occur in families with children under age six. Older children, who have a better understanding of cause and effect, may have the capacity to deny what they have seen and may be preoccupied with anger and righteous indignation. They may also be subject to symptoms of regression, such as bedwetting and thumb-sucking, and have difficulties with school performance. …