Hi Amp –

Thanks for all the time you’ve devoted to my work.

As you already noted, my opinion is that if you want to study people’s childhoods after their parents divorced, you have to ask them questions about, well, after their parents’ divorce. Perhaps this is a problem or even a limitation, as you suggest, but I think you’re hard-pressed to claim that it “invalidates” the whole study.

And while the children of good divorce *generally* fare worse than those from unhappy, low-conflict marriages, on some selected items they fared about the same or better. But in general (i.e., on more items) they fared worse and that is the only claim I’ve ever made in that regard.

This study does not claim to examine “outcomes” or “long-term effects.” It studies the quality of childhood itself by asking adults from divorced and intact families to reflect, retrospectively, on their childhoods.

The problem I have with making a distinction between pain and pathology is that is carries an assumption that pain doesn’t matter so long as it doesn’t result in pathology. I’m interested in both. We have a lot of studies documenting pathology among children of divorce. I’m interested in going deeper and looking at pain too. And I think most parents are interested not just in what might cause pathology in their children but also what might cause pain.

In response to Rachel S., yes, longitudinal studies are the gold-standard. Our study is cross-sectional. It is the first to take on the “good” divorce, the first to examine the moral and spiritual experiences of children of divorce, and the first national survey in the U.S. of grown children of divorce. It is also a beginning. There is much more work to be done. I sincerely hope that other researchers will also take on these questions, in particular the moral and spiritual development of children of divorce. If they are seeking funding for a longitudinal study I would be happy to write a letter of support.

Again, many thanks,

Elizabeth Marquardt

Low conflict unhappy marriages would, one would suspect, still be better marriages, on average, than unhappy marriages where either party exercised a unilateral right to divorce that exists in almost every state, even if some marriages that end in divorce are better than others.

Unhappy but tolerable marriages would be expected to stay together, unhappy and intolerable marriages would be expected to fall apart.

Surely, there is overlap, where a marriage could have gone either way. But, it is virtually impossible in a post-hoc survey to compare.

Until you have get a survey group and meaningfully predict happiness in advance, and then see who gets divorced and who doesn’t and how that compares with predictions, it is hard to make a valid comparison.

Where 51% of one group say they are happy, and 35% of another do, that is a sufficiently subtle difference to capture the tolerable v. intolerable distinction.

To do a really valid study, one ought to study, for example, families that delayed a divorce in Ireland until it was legal, with comparable families in England, who divorced much earlier. Even then, I’m aware of no studies that show that seperation from bed and board is better than divorce for children.