The Myth of the ‘Good Divorce’

• Post by: Bryce J. Christensen
• June 9, 2012

Since the no-fault regime was established in the 1970s, the so-called helping professions have performed verbal gymnastics to soothe the consciences of divorcing parents, claiming that if they work hard and maintain a “good divorce,” the effects upon their children will be minimal. Yet a groundbreaking study by Paul Amato suggests that the very concept of a divorce that can accommodate children is pure fiction; the noted sociologist establishes that children of parents who claim to have achieved a good divorce fare not much better than peers whose parents make no such claim. Amato and his research team at Penn State conducted a cluster analysis of 944 post-divorce families using data from Waves 2 (1992–94) and 3 (2001–03) of the National Survey of Families and Households. Within their sample, they identified three types of divorcing families: those with high-contact or “cooperating coparenting,” meaning parents with a “good divorce,” who report the highest scores in terms of their children talking to them, visiting with them, and staying overnight with the nonresident parent; “parallel parenting with some conflict” where nonresident parents have only moderate levels of contact with children; and “single parenting” in which the nonresident parent, in most cases the father, rarely see his children and has little communication with the mother. The Penn State researchers then measured the differences between the three divorce-parenting clusters and six indicators of children’s adjustment and well-being when the children were between ages 7 and 19 (Wave 2), and another six indicators when the children were between the ages of 19 and 33 (Wave 3). In only two of the twelve measures (behavior problems in childhood, reported by parents, and having close ties to their fathers in adulthood, reported by children) did the children of the cooperating-coparenting cluster have significantly more desirable scores than their peers from the other two fa