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Summary: Hands down the single best book on divorces' effect.
Review: This book offers a sorely needed perspective of the children's. It's for parents who are divorced or considering it, children whose parents are divorced and spouses of children of divorce. Our divorce culture inadvertently places the emphasis on the parents, on their rights and their time with kids, their feelings and their perspectives. Few people are able to understand what the children really feel and go through unless they have been through it themselves.Here, Wallerstein does a masterful job of describing how divorce affects children both immediately after the divorce and 25 years later based on first-hand accounts. She also compares those children to their neighbors and friends who grew up in intact families. She points out what struggles they have in relationships and life afterward and what they need to mend properly. A must read for anybody involved with or affected by divorce!
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Summary: Divorce Culture's Lies Revealed!!
Review: The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce is an important book. Using a twenty-five year study the author debunks all of the myths of the divorce culture in which we now live. These lies: that children are resilient and will 'bounce back', that little children don't know what's going on, that when parents are happy their children will be happy, that not fighting in front of children shields them from the effects of divorce, that divorce is a temporary crisis in the child's life, and that as soon as the splitting parents stabalize their lives the children will recover, are demolished point by point. The author demonstrates, through examples in her case studies, that: very little children experience very big feelings about divorce (including rage and fear), that each lifestage a child goes through causes them to re-live the divorce again in some new way, that divorce causes personal and relationship issues for the children well into adulthood, and that the divorce culture is creating a new generation of people who choose not to marry and risk reliving their parents mistakes. The author also takes on the important, if uncomfortable, truth that parents do not usually want to do the work of taking on the issues that their divorce creates for their children. Not fighting in front of the children isn't enough. Children need to be given opportunities to express their anger at having their lives torn apart, their homes and friends snatched away, and time with their parents disappear. The author points out that parents are usually more concerned with dealing with their own issues surrounding the divorce, working on new relationships, and rebuilding their personal social lives. The children of divorce are typically left on their own emotionally, sometimes literally. She also addresses the issue of children having to adjust to new step-parents, lovers, and step-siblings. The problem of competition between children and step parents is also treated with frankness. Children are far too often given short shrift when a new step-parent feels threatened or that the child is taking up too much: time, space, money, attention, etc. The author is admirably blunt in stating that if forced to choose, parents more often than not choose the new spouse over their child. This is an important work that should serve as a wake-up call. Divorce hurts children. Children of divorce are more likely to get divorced, creating more hurt children. Our society cannot survive too many more generations of this cycle before we implode upon ourselves. Read this book.
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