Is there a `good divorce' for children?

In the first three months of 1999 in the Republic, divorce applications rose significantly to 931 applications for divorce, up from 760 applications in the first quarter of 1998. In the past two years, 5,000 people have applied for divorce and 2,700 have had their divorces granted. The first divorce applications in Irish courts were uncontested, but since the beginning of the year, the proportion of contested divorces is increasing.

In the middle of this increasing number of divorces are the children. While many people believe staying together for the children is preferable to separation and divorce, the evidence of psychological research is quite the opposite. Children are better off living with happily separated or divorced parents than they are living with married parents in an ongoing atmosphere of strife and anxiety, according to 25 years of research by Judith Wallerstein, a Californian psychologist specialising in the effects of divorce on children. Some self-sacrifice is necessary for a healthy marriage, but marriage is not a licence to put up with abuse or unfaithfulness, believes Jan Johnston, a US expert on children and divorce and executive director at the Judith Wallerstein Centre in California. "If a parent stays with an abusive partner, what kind of message is that giving to the children?" she asks.

In the US, 40 per cent of children are affected by divorce, 20 per cent are the children of single parents and 40 per cent are living in intact marriages. The divorce rate is 50 per cent of all marriages, making divorce a key formative influence on an entire generation of adults who as children experienced their parents' marriage break-ups.

Those studied long-term at the Wallerstein Centre have said that their parents' divorce was "one of the worst things that ever happened to them, and this feeling persists into middle-age", says Johnston. But while the sense of loss is enduring, in the "good" divorce, the loss is transformed into a "growth experience". Supportive adults - including those in the wider community - enable the children to see the divorce in a positive light, helping them to realise that the divorce was not their fault.

"When people see divorce as a disaster, the children feel like they are products of a disaster and that they are mistakes," says Johnston. In the good divorce, children feel that they are loved and wanted. They are secure in the knowledge that their parents will never emotionally abandon them. And, most importantly, they are not involved in the conflict either as witnesses or go-betweens. Too often, parents, the wider family, friends, health-care professionals and lawyers engage in "tribal warfare", says Johnston. Two families line up on each side, often with health professionals getting in on the act, supporting one parent as saintly, while condemning the other as paranoid, alcoholic or abusive. "Children become caught up in loyalty conflicts where they are forced to make unholy alliances with adults on either side of the battle in order to ensure that they continue to feel loved," says Johnston.

"So much of how successful a divorce is has to do with the help or hindrance divorcing couples and their children get from friends, family, community, lawyers, healthcare professionals and the courts," she says. "So much of what we have done with divorce has been through the fault and adversarial system. In what is the most miserable time in people's lives, we compound that by drawing them into an adversarial system - and the children lose out. It's one of the most painful times in children's lives." The ultimate damage of a bad divorce is when one parent drops out of the children's lives forever. Research by Wallerstein has shown that children do not experience this abandonment as a single loss, but as a series of losses which emerge as important issues at different stages throughout children's lives, even into adulthood.

For example, a boy who is stunned by the loss of his biological father, may effectively lose his mother as well if she is forced to work outside the home. She may become so depressed that when she is at home, she is not emotionally present for her child. In later life, the boy may relive the loss when he grieves for the lack of a strong role-model and father figure. "Such boys may take on hyper-masculine posturing in order to avoid being swallowed up by their mothers," says Johnston.

Female children, deprived of an admiring and supportive father, may enter serial relationships with men, never expecting any of them to stick around for long. Seeking love, they may then repeat the pattern of abandonment by having children with successive men who leave them.

THESE tragic patterns, which are being repeated in the US and, increasingly, in Irish society, could be prevented if society as a whole took a more mature and responsible attitude to separation and divorce, Johnston believes. In California, the courts insist that all parents undergoing separation and divorce proceedings take parenting classes.

Californian courts also insist that parents arguing over custody and care of children go into mediation instead of using issues of access and maintenance to point-score in the adversarial system.

Children, meanwhile, need to learn about marriage and parenting in school, Johnston believes. In the Republic, too, there are ample signs that young people are losing faith in marriage: particularly the statistic that one in three children is born outside marriage. Many Irish children do not have in their lives role models of good marriage. Instead they see their parents in serial relationships which never last, with the result the children are afraid to trust anybody.

Groups like Teen Between and Relateteen are leading the way by helping young people to negotiate the emotional minefields of divorce so that in later adult life, they are free from some of the issues of loss and abandonment that can wreck future marriages. With emotional support and someone to listen, more young people are learning that there is happiness after divorce.

Teen Between and Relateteen are jointly holding a conference, An Eye to the Future: Accepting the Changes to Family Life in Ireland, at the Slieve Russell Hotel, Co Cavan, on November 25th and 26th. The cost is £130 per person sharing (residential) and £85 per person (non-residential). Places are limited; closing date this Friday. Contact Teen Between, Marriage and Relationships Counselling Services, 24 Grafton Street, Dublin 2, (016710902)