Welcome!
Welcome to the website of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce written by Elizabeth Marquardt (Crown Books, 2005). Use the links on the left to navigate throughout the site.
Reviews — Book Blurbs
“According to … [this new study of] 1,500 children of divorce aged 18 to 35, those whose parents divorced before the kids were 16 often had trouble reconciling their two worlds. Others feel compelled to carry or keep secrets. So if you must divorce, don’t be fooled into thinking it’s going to be a happy time, at least not for your kids.”
— Dr. Joyce Brothers, column, March 10, 2006
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“While everyone knows divorce is tough on kids, researcher and writer Elizabeth Marquardt says even when the split is amicable, kids still suffer. For her controversial new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, Marquardt spent three years interviewing 1,500 young adults—half from divorced families—who described the painful emotional, moral and spiritual dilemmas they faced.”
— Newsweek, October 24, 2005
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…makes a persuasive case against the culture of casual divorce.
— Washington Post, October 30, 2005
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Even in a “good divorce,” in which parents amicably minimize their conflicts, children of divorce inhabit a more difficult emotional landscape than those in intact families, according to a new survey of 1,500 people ages 18 to 35. … [Marquardt] is, she says, the first child of divorce to publish a broad study on how divorce affects children. … Ms. Marquardt’s book paints a detailed picture of the kinds of tensions children live with, using examples both from her own life — her parents separated when she was 2 — and from interviews with 70 other young adults.
— New York Times, November 5, 2005
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While good splits are better than bitter ones are, the best divorces still leave children with lasting inner conflict, says Marquardt… herself a child of a good divorce. Her study makes her case in the just published Between Two Worlds.
— U.S. News and World Report, September 26, 2005
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Is “good divorce” an oxymoron? That debate is being rekindled by psychologists and relationship experts across the country, in part by Elizabeth Marquardt’s new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, in which she says there is no such thing as a good divorce.
— Denver Post, February 9, 2006
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No one disputes that some marriages must be dissolved. What concerns Ms. Marquardt is that the “happy talk” about well-managed breakups lets adults dismiss and make light of children’s real experiences. While her book may help grown-up children make sense of those experiences, it also carries a strong message for parents who are deciding whether to end a marriage: There may be no such thing as a “good divorce.”
— Wall Street Journal, October 21, 2005
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Cataloguing results from national survey research and vignettes from her own childhood, Elizabeth Marquardt attempts to contradict the current conventional wisdom that parents who don’t fight in front of their children, who share custody and communicate well can make divorce no big deal for the kids. … Marquardt says she’s focusing on that pain not to blame parents who divorce, but to call attention to the needs of the [children].
— New York Post, October 30, 2005
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Marquardt says she and other young adults who grew up in the divorce explosion of the ‘70s and ‘80s are still dealing with wounds that they could never talk about with their parents. … The results of [her] study — and a poignant narrative of her own experience — are contained in her new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. … Marquardt said she hopes adult children of divorce come away from her book realizing, “It’s not just me. I’m not alone.”
— Chicago Tribune, November 13, 2005
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For years, divorce has been a touchy subject, and not just for the couples involved…. [Marquardt] wants parents to think twice before these “low-conflict” break-ups, which she says accounts for about two-thirds of divorces.
— Dallas Morning News, January 18, 2006
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The children in Marquardt’s book are forced to grow up fast and learn to bridge their parents’ different worlds. Surely we can find more creative ways to minimize this lifelong trauma.
— Philadelphia Inquirer, October 27, 2005 (column by syndicated columnist Jane Eisner)
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…[Between Two Worlds] is not intended to make parents feel bad. But it’s a caution and a bit of a cultural wake-up call. …Sometimes, of course, divorce really has to happen. Sometimes the marriage is ended by one spouse, leaving the other to cope…And, in the end, as Marquardt notes, it’s the couple’s business. But divorce is not always the only option.
— Sacramento Bee, October 28, 2005 (column by syndicated columnist Kathryn Jean Lopez)
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The point of Between Two Worlds is neither to heap guilt upon divorced people nor to insist that no one should ever get divorced….Rather, Marquardt says that we need to stop fooling ourselves about the toll divorce takes on kids. …If Marquardt’s book is unlikely to single-handedly stem the tide of divorce, it will at least force us to be honest about the effects of divorce on kids—and knowing more about what children are living through, perhaps we can do more to help.
— The Christian Century, February 7, 2006 (review by Lauren Winner)
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Many researchers say that if children “don’t end up drug addicts in the street,” it means they are just fine and the divorce wasn’t a problem for them, says Mrs. Marquardt, who is one of roughly 15 million Generation Xers — or one in four persons ages 18 to 35 — whose parents divorced. “But just because you’ve managed to survive something and come through it OK doesn’t mean at all that the experience was no big deal. … As a society, we still have not grasped just how radical divorce really is,” [she] says…
— Washington Times, September 27, 2005
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… Marquardt certainly achieves her first goal of contributing to the literature on the effects of divorce—particularly in children’s moral and spiritual development….
— Library Journal, July 1, 2005
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Between Two Worlds is illuminating for what it conveys about divorce, but it is equally striking for what it says about marriage: that the couple’s essential task is to make one home from their two conflicting selves, creating an ideal context for a child’s spiritual and emotional growth. In intact families, this struggle goes largely unnoticed by the children. After divorce the conflict no longer rests on the parents’ shoulders but takes root in the heart of the child.
— Books and Culture, September 12, 2005
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Marquardt, and those to whom she gives voice, offer our culture a hard gift, the gift of truth. She challenges the conventional and comfortable wisdom: that divorce doesn’t matter if the parents get along, if the kids don’t look like damaged goods, and as long as parents keep loving their children.
— Seattle Post Intelligencer, February 10, 2006 (column by Anthony B Robinson)
Speaker Information Request Form
To invite Elizabeth Marquardt as a speaker to your event, or to receive more information, please complete this simple form. If you have any problems, please call (212) 246-3942. For a summary of topics, see below.
Summary
Children of divorce who stay in touch with both parents must become travelers between two worlds. Even those whose parents have an amicable or “good” divorce experience a profound and lasting inner conflict, one that shapes their moral and spiritual identities into adulthood.
When parents are married it is primarily their job to make sense of their different worlds, their two sets of beliefs, values, and ways of living. This work often sparks conflict. It is important for parents to handle conflict well, but what is equally important – but has not been acknowledged – is that in a marriage the conflict between the parents’ worlds is first the parents’ job, and never the child’s alone.
By contrast, when parents divorce they each retreat to live in their own worlds. Over time their beliefs, values, and ways of living become increasingly different. Yet the conflict between their worlds does not disappear. Instead, the job of making sense of their often strikingly different ways of thinking and living now falls instead to the child alone.
Early Moral Forgers
Elizabeth Marquardt argues that this new developmental task fundamentally restructures childhood. Children of divorce are forced to become “early moral forgers.” They must confront their parents’ differing values and beliefs and determine, alone and at a young age, what their own beliefs and values will be. When they ask some of the fundamental questions that everyone must confront on the road to building their own identities – Who am I? Where did I come from? What is right and wrong? – they look to two completely different models, two ways of being that they often see as fundamentally at odds with one another.
After the divorce, a high degree of conflict between the parents does make the child’s job harder. But the key point is that a relative absence of conflict between divorced parents – or what some call an amicable or “good” divorce – does little to minimize the magnitude of this task. In an amicable divorce the adults rarely conflict with one another (usually maintaining the peace by communicating less and less over the years). Instead, the conflict between their worlds has now migrated and exists, unseen, in only one place: within the inner life of the child.
A Glimpse at the Data
The inner conflict handed to children of divorce has consequences. Among the nationally-representative findings reported in this book (with hard numbers and a control group of young people from intact families):
- Young adults from divorced families are much more likely to say that, growing up, they felt like a different person with each of their parents.
- They are much more likely to say their divorced parents were polar opposites, even in the majority of cases when their parents did not conflict a lot.
- They are much more likely to say that they kept secrets for their parents, even when their parents did not ask them to.
- They are more likely to say they feared resembling one of their parents too much, because it might alienate them from the other parent.
- They are much more likely to say they often felt alone as a child.
- They are more likely to say that at times they felt like an outsider in their home.
Impact on Spiritual Journey
The moral confusion and isolation these children experience impact their spiritual journeys as well. Very little research has been done on the religious and spiritual experience of children of divorce. New findings reported in this book show that, as a group, when they grow up, children of divorce are less religious than their peers from intact families. But some become much more religious as a result of their parents’ divorce (with more of them agreeing, for instance, that God became the father or parent they never had in real life) while some become less. Children of divorce are more likely to agree that the suffering they witness in the world and in their own lives makes them doubt the existence of a loving God. They are more likely to feel that no one really understands them and more of them feel that the hardships in their life come from God.
Most existing research on children of divorce examines outer symptoms, looking at issues such as school failure, delinquency, serious depression, teen pregnancy, and substance abuse. Some observers feel that if children of divorce don’t end up with serious, diagnosable problems like these then they – and the divorce – must be “fine.” This study is the first of its kind to show that even children of divorce who go on to graduate from college and do reasonably well, or even very well, in life, still had significant and challenging obstacles handed to them at a young age, obstacles they were often forced to overcome with little or no guidance or recognition.
About the Study
The study reported in this book was generously funded by the Lilly Endowment and includes the first-ever nationally representative survey of young adults from divorced families. The survey, fielded by SRBI Inc. in New York City, involved 1,500 randomly selected young adults from around the country between the ages of 18 and 35 years old. Half of these young people experienced their parents’ divorce before they were fourteen years old and the other half grew up in intact families. Those from divorced families continued to stay in contact with both parents after the divorce. The questions included in the national survey were inspired by seventy-one in-person interviews Marquardt conducted with young adults in the same age group in four urban areas of the country.
Reviews
How the ‘Good Divorce’ Affects Children
by Wayne Holst | National Catholic Register | March 24, 2006
Author Seeks Truth about ‘Good Divorce’
by Anthony B. Robinson | Seattle Post-Intelligencer | February 10, 2006
“Good” Divorce a Myth?
by Carrie McClure | Denver Post | February 9, 2006
After Divorce
by Lauren Winner | The Christian Century | February 7, 2006
Even children of ‘good’ divorce can carry wounds into adulthood
By Nancy Churnin | The Dallas Morning News | January 18, 2006
Wounds of Divorce Linger Long Past Childhood
By Patrick Kampert | The Chicago Tribune | November 13, 2005
Poll Says Even Quiet Divorce Affects Children’s Paths
By Tamar Lewin | The New York Times | November 5, 2005
Broken Homes, Broken Children
By Mary Eberstadt | The American Conservative | November 7, 2005 issue
Fumbling Childhood
By Kristine Steakley | Breakpoint | November 3, 2005
Divorce Hurts
By Christine Whelan | The New York Post | October 30, 2005
No Good Divorce
By Mark Trainer | The Washington Post | October 30, 2005
Mind the Kids in a Divorce
By Kathryn Jean Lopez | Sacramento Bee | October 28, 2005
No “Good Divorce”
By Jane Eisner | The Philadelphia Inquirer | October 27, 2005
Straight Talk about ‘Happy Talk’ Is There Such a Thing as a “Good Divorce”?
Review & Outlook | Wall Street Journal | October 21, 2005
Fast Chat: The Secret Pain of Divorce
By Peg Tyre | Newsweek | October 24, 2005 issue
Between Two Worlds
By Michael J. McManus (Ethics & Religion syndicated columnist) | October 19, 2005
Divided They Fall
By Jennifer Roback Morse | townhall.com | October 17, 2005
Divorce Study Breaks New Ground
By Maggie Gallagher (syndicated columnist) | October 11, 2004
Divorce’s Lasting Effects
By Cheryl Wetzstein | The Washington Times | September 27, 2005
On the Bookshelf: For Kids, No ‘Good’ Divorces
By Katy Kelly | U.S. News & World Report | September 26, 2005
Dissecting Divorce
By Jenny Schroedel | Books & Culture | Week of September 12
Review by “Library Journal”
July 1, 2005
Review by “Publisher’s Weekly”
June 13, 2005
Press Release
THE INNER LIVES OF CHILDREN OF DIVORCE
by Elizabeth Marquardt
Over the past few decades, divorce has become an increasingly popular choice for adults who feel trapped in unhappy marriages. We hear a lot about the plusses of “blended families” and the importance of having a “good” divorce—but rarely do we hear about the real and lasting effects divorce has on the approximately one million children whose parents divorce each year. That is, until now. A new national study challenges our perception of divorce and reveals, in poignant detail, how divorce dramatically shapes the inner lives of children into young adulthood. In BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown Publishers, September 27, 2005, $24.95, Hardcover and Three Rivers Press, September 2006, $13.95, Paperback), Elizabeth Marquardt, with exclusive access to the first such study, reports on the emotional, moral, and spiritual lives of the first generation of young people to grow up in an era of widespread divorce.
In BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, Marquardt explains:
- Children of so-called “good” divorces often compare poorly even to children of unhappy marriages, and look much worse than children raised in happy marriages. Even when divorced parents behave well, their divorce confronts the child with the monumental task of having to make sense, alone, of the parents’ very different beliefs, values, and ways of living – a job the parents are no longer required to do.
- As a consequence, children of both “good” and “bad” divorces come to feel like divided selves. They lead a wholly separate life in each parent’s world, leading over time to a troubling inner division that goes to the heart of their identity.
- In divorced families secrets are epidemic. Children of divorce feel highly protective of each parent and routinely keep secrets for them, even when their parents do not ask them to. The parents know little about their child’s life when the child is living with the other parent, and the child knows little about one parent’s world while living with the other.
Marquardt, who is now thirty-four, interweaves her own story of growing up as the child of a “good” divorce with the findings of her study, co-investigated with Norval Glenn (a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin), to create a stunning new portrait of this new generation. She explores the ways in which children of divorce:
- Must grow up too soon because they are less protected from their parents’ worries, feel less emotionally safe, are far less able to go to their parents for comfort, and are much more often left alone.
- Are forced to figure out the big questions in life alone because divorced parents often hold different moral views and no longer talk about those views together.
- Experience a loss of trust that affects their belief in God—making them much less religious than their peers from intact families, or (for a much smaller number) dramatically strengthening their faith. Of those children of divorce who were regular attenders at a place of worship, only one quarter said someone from the clergy or congregation reached out to them when their parents split up.
Marquardt gives life to the numbers in her study with vivid, moving stories and quotations from the many young adults she interviewed in person around the country. In BETWEEN TWO WORLDS, Marquardt believes, without apology, that it is vital that children, whenever possible, grow up with their own two married parents. But she states emphatically that she does not believe divorced parents are bad people, nor that anyone should remain a prisoner of an abusive marriage. Instead, Marquardt argues that even though we must be compassionate about the needs and experiences of divorced parents, we cannot allow that concern to prevent us from confronting, unflinchingly, the inner lives of the children.
About the Author
Elizabeth Marquardt is an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan think tank focused on children, families, and civil society. Her essays and op-ed pieces have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere. Marquardt, now thirty-four, did national publicity as coauthor of a groundbreaking study on college women’s attitudes about sex and dating, appearing on The Today Show, World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, The O’Reilly Factor, CNN’s Talk Back Live, and NPR’s All Things Considered. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two children.
Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce • Elizabeth Marquardt • Crown Publishers • On sale: September 27, 2005 • ISBN: 0-307-23710-9 • 288 pages • Hardcover • $24.95 • www.crownpublishing.com
Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce • Elizabeth Marquardt • Three Rivers Press • On sale: September 2006 • ISBN: 0-307-23711-7 • Trade Paperback • $13.95 • www.crownpublishing.com
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From the Introduction…
What Is Not Known About Our Generation
I am seven years old and climbing the jungle gym outside my school when I overhear two mothers, standing nearby. One says, “Kids with divorced parents are kicked back and forth like a football.” The image grabs me. In this small, rural community, I had never heard anyone talk about divorce, even though my own parents had separated when I was two years old and divorced a year later. The divorce was a silent fact of my life, unnoticed by other kids, mentioned by adults only when they asked me how my father was doing when I came back from visiting him.
Kicked back and forth like a football. Even a seven-year-old could sense that this was bad; no one likes to be kicked. But it sounded playful as well. I could see me — the football — flying end over end against a blue sky. It was the kick and the thud on the other end that imparted a vague sense of threat.
Sometime later, while visiting my father, I tried out the idea, mentioning lightly that I was kicked back and forth like a football between him and my mother. His face turned a deep purplish red, his lips tightened, he sputtered. He looked the same way whenever he was angry — this time at the person who had said such a thing to me. He sought to regain control and assured me, sternly, that this image did not apply to me. He and my mother loved me, he said. That saying about the football was about kids whose parents didn’t love them.
I had to admit, at the time and over the years, that I didn’t feel as if my parents were trying to pass me off to each other. I never felt a rough kick at the airport or at the beginning of a long car ride. On the contrary, my parents were always sad to see me go, and we hugged excitedly when I ran to one of them after a long separation.
Still, there was something about that football. I could see it spinning in its arc, flying freely, even beautifully, from the one who launched it to the one who caught it. it seemed almost too high, too free; it belonged neither to the place it had left nor to the place where it was going. Maybe it belonged in that space between. And what a conditional space that was.
I am still thinking about the football and about the deeper implications of that metaphor. This book seeks to answer the question that as a child I was unable to put into words: If your parents love you and they get along reasonably well with each other, why is their divorce still so wrenching for the child?
A New Survey of Young Adults from Divorced Families
It was that question that led me to undertake the Project on the Moral and Spiritual Lives of Children of Divorce, a three-year study I directed with the help of an advisory committee of senior family scholars, and with the funding of the Lilly Endowment.
As part of the study, I co-directed with Dr. Norval Glenn, a sociologist and leading family scholar at the University of Texas at Austin, the first nationally representative survey of young men and women from around the country between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five years old. Half of them experienced their parents’ divorce before they were fourteen years old and the other half grew up in intact families. Those from divorced families continued to see both parents in the years after the divorce.
The questions were inspired by seventy-one in-person interviews I conducted with young adults in the same age group. Again, half experienced their parents’ divorce before they were fourteen years old and the other half grew up in intact families. Like the fifteen hundred young adults we surveyed by telephone, the young people I met with in person did not lose touch with a parent after the divorce. The only difference was that while the national survey included young adults with varying levels of educational attainment, the seventy-one young people I met with in person were all college graduates. The fact that they had completed college made it less likely that they were struggling with serious social or emotional problems, which allowed us to see the effects of divorce on those who had proven especially resilient. This indicator was important because I had always felt it was too simple to say that divorce “ruined” children’s lives; I was more interested in the long-term difficulties it caused even for those who seemed to have weathered it well.
Almost all of the questions posed in this study have never before been asked of children of divorce. The new questions were fueled not only by the comments of those I interviewed in person but also by a lifetime of experience as a child of divorce.
Because I too am a child of divorce, I decided to write this book in the first person (“I” and “we”), but this book is not a memoir. It includes statistics (all drawn from the study unless otherwise noted) as well as substantial stories and quotations from the many young adults I interviewed in person. Their stories give faces and voices to the numbers and, together with the nationally representative survey data, allow me to speak with confidence for my generation.
What This Book Is Not About
There are a couple of things this book is not about. First, this book does not argue that no one should ever get divorced. Divorce is a vital option for ending very bad marriages. In homes where there is abuse, violence, serial infidelity, chronic addiction, or other serious problems, the best way to protect members of the family, especially the children, may be to end those marriages.
One major national study has turned up an important finding that helps clarify the question of when divorce is necessary. The researchers found that one-third of divorces end high-conflict marriages, in which the parents report physical abuse or serious and frequent quarreling. Not surprisingly, the children do better after these high-conflict marriages end. However, two-thirds of divorces end low-conflict marriages, in which the parents divorce because they are unhappy or unfulfilled, or have other problems that are not seriously threatening. The children of low-conflict couples fare worse after divorce because the divorce marks their first exposure to a serious problem. One day, without much warning, their world just falls apart.
Most parents take the decision to divorce quite seriously, but I urge parents to think harder still. For those who wish to save and improve their marriages there are resources they may not know about. But in the end it is not my place to tell any particular couple whether or not they should divorce; only they can look at all the evidence, get the help they need, and decide for themselves whether divorce is warranted.
Second, this book does not argue that divorced parents are bad people. Many people who mean the world to me are divorced, including my own parents. I firmly believe that no one besides the couple knows the full extent of what goes on in someone else’s marriage and that some marriages have failed miserably long before the couple begins to think of divorce. It is also the case that most marriages with children are ended by only one of the parents, leaving the other parent to cope with a fate that he or she did not want or imagine.
Yet as much as I believe we should support and understand the needs of divorced or single parents, I feel even more strongly that we should not let our concern for them prevent us from looking unflinchingly at the experience of children of divorce. Children are voiceless: they don’t write books, they don’t vote, they don’t usually get interviewed on television. We learn about their experience by sensitively observing their lives and later, when they are grown up, asking them what it was like. For too long the debate about divorce in this country has been dominated by the adult perspective on divorce, with some adults charging that divorce is unjustifiably rampant and others retorting that divorce is a right that no one can question.
We have begun to look at divorce from the child’s point of view, but it is only that — just a beginning. We must be sensitive to the experience of divorced adults, but for the sake of the children — those of us who are the first generation to come of age with widespread divorce, and the current generation of young children — we need to confront the truth of their lives as well.
Growing Up in a Different Culture
Among the people I met while writing this book was Jennifer, a thirty-one-year-old scientist whose parents have been married for thirty-five years. She is currently dating a guy she loves who happens to be from a divorced family. He wants to get married and Jennifer does too, but she is afraid. Jennifer wants a long, happy marriage like her parents had, and she fears that maybe she and her boyfriend are just too different to make it work.
Jennifer told me that when she was growing up, “a lot of children from divorced families that I knew were really independent. They did a lot of things on their own that I would never have dreamed of doing, because they didn’t grow up with this protective net around them. They had Mom’s house and they had Dad’s house and they were kind of in between, taking care of themselves.” Her boyfriend being a child of divorce, she said, “makes me a little nervous, quite honestly. It’s almost like coming from a different culture.”
I hope the fact that her boyfriend’s parents divorced will not dissuade Jennifer from marrying him if they really love each other. But Jennifer is right — children of divorce often do seem to float between their mother’s and father’s homes, having to take care of themselves at a much earlier age than other children do. Growing up in a divorced family is like growing up in a different culture.
There is something unique going on with children of divorce, something Jennifer and many others have difficulty putting their finger on. That inexplicable “something” is what this book is about.
Full Survey Data
Methodology
The project on the moral and spiritual lives of children of divorce was based at the Institute for American Values in New York City. The study was co-investigated by Elizabeth Marquardt, an affiliate scholar at the Institute for American Values, and Professor Norval Glenn, a sociologist at the University of Texas-Austin, in consultation with a team of advisors. Project advisors included Judith Wallerstein of the Center for the Family in Transition and author of The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25 Year Landmark Study; Don Browning of the University of Chicago Divinity School and founder of the Religion, Culture, and Family Project; and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-founder of the National Marriage Project and author of The Divorce Culture. The project was funded by the Lilly Endowment Inc.
The study consisted of a nationally-representative telephone survey and in-person interviews.
The instrument for the nationally-representative survey was developed by Elizabeth Marquardt and Norval Glenn. It was fielded by the survey research firm SRBI, Inc. in New York City in February – May 2003. The survey included 1500 young adults (18-35 year olds), half from divorced families and half from intact families. Study participants from divorced families were required to have seen both parents a minimum of once a year in the years following the divorce, but often they had much more contact than just once a year. None of the participants from divorced or intact families had experienced the death of a parent before they themselves were eighteen years old, nor were any of them adopted. Participants from intact families had parents who got married before the participant was born, stayed married, and are still married today, unless one or both died after the participant turned eighteen.
The survey results are supplemented by seventy-one additional in-person interviews with young adults, again, half from divorced families and half from intact families (35 divorced family, 36 intact family). These 71 young adults were randomly recruited by SRBI, Inc. from selected zip codes in Atlanta; Chicago; Arlington, Virginia; and suburban Philadelphia. In-person interviews were conducted during the spring and summer of 2001. After receiving a list of recruits from SRBI, Marquardt contacted each recruit by telephone or email and scheduled a time and place in their area to meet for an audiotape-recorded interview, which typically lasted at least two hours. The interviews were then transcribed.
Because so many studies focus on the question of how many children of divorce have obvious, serious problems, and in order to test whether divorce influences the lives of all children, even those who appear to be “fine,” we recruited “successful” children of divorce — that is to say, college graduates — for the 71 in-person interviews. In this way we sought to obtain a qualitative sample of young people with divorced parents who appeared to be doing well and who were not likely to have experienced other hardships besides divorce.
By contrast, in recruiting for the national survey sample of 1500 young people we did not require participants to be college graduates (i.e., “successful”). In all other ways the recruiting for the national survey and the in-person interviews was the same. This way the national survey numbers tell us about all children of divorce who stay in touch with both parents (and not just those who graduated from college) while the in-person interviews, from which the stories and anecdotes in the study are drawn, were conducted with the children of divorce who managed to graduate from college and generally appear to be successful. Note that young people who lost all contact with a parent after the divorce were not studied and their experience is not reflected in any of the survey data or in-person interviews reported in the study.
Appendix A (PDF file, 8 pages, 60 KB) and Appendix B (PDF file, 154 pages, 499 KB) are the full survey data Marquardt refers to in Between Two Worlds and in media interviews. In these electronic tables, unlike in the book, the numbers responding to each question are posted (as well as percentages that are also available in the book), allowing researchers to conduct significance tests. In addition, demographic information not found in the book is available at the end of Appendix B.
Clergy Room
Workshops
In Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, Elizabeth Marquardt reports new findings from a Lilly Endowment-funded study about the moral, spiritual, and religious impact of divorce on children and young adults from divorced families. One-quarter of today’s young adults are children of divorce. Of those who were active in a church when their parents split up, two-thirds say that no one from the clergy or congregation reached out to them at that time. When they grow up, young adults from divorced families are overall much less religious and much less likely to be tied to a faith community.
In these clergy workshops, Marquardt shares many new findings and compelling stories about the faith journeys of young people from divorced families. She asks clergy to share their own experience working with children and families faced with divorce and offers extensive practical suggestions in the areas of preaching and teaching, liturgy, pastoral care, and outreach to the community. The workshops will empower clergy to strengthen their ministries to children, young adults, and families in practices that involve the whole congregation’s understanding of the importance of marriage and the impact of divorce.
A clergy workshop will take up to two hours but is flexible given the needs of the audience.
To learn more about the clergy workshops, or if you’d like to invite Elizabeth Marquardt to give one in your area, complete this simple form or call (212) 246-3942 if you have problems.
DVD
DVD Now Available
Elizabeth Marquardt and a team have produced a short film, now available on DVD, that is based on new research reported in Between Two Worlds. The film features seven grown children of divorce talking about faith, family of origin, and marriage. Read more (NB: You will be redirected to the the Center for Marriage and Families’ website, which Ms. Marquardt directs.)
Articles
A Crisis of Faith
Beliefnet | September 5, 2006
Children of Divorce
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly | June 2, 2006
If You Talk to Them, They Will Come (pdf file, 126 kb, 17 pages)
Understanding and Ministering to One-Quarter of Today’s Young Adults—Children of Divorce Family Ministry | Spring 2006
Lives of Quiet Turbulence (pdf file, 208 kb, 4 pgs)
Christianity Today | March 2006
Ministering to Children of Divorce Throughout Their Lives
Circuit Rider | May/June 2002
Children of Divorce: Stories of Exile
The Christian Century | February 2001
Recommended Resources
From Christianity.com — a Bible study based on Between Two Worlds.
For more information or to download a copy ($5.95) visit: Dealing with Divorce: What happens to a child’s soul when his or her world is ripped in two?
A quality, faith-based support group curriculum for young children: Divorce Care for Kids (www.dc4k.org)