IN JULY 1999, Sesame Street aired an episode in which Kermit the Frog, dressed as a reporter, interviewed a little bird asking her where she lived. The happy little bird chirped that she lives part of the time in one tree where she frolics in her mother's nest and the rest of her time in a separate tree where she frolics with her dad. The little bird concluded merrily, "they both love me," and ran off to play. This, of course, restates the beguiling myth of divorce. Watching this, we are meant to understand that divorce is a minor upheaval and normal occurrence in the lives of children and adults. Not to worry, it says to the child. Your parents will continue their loving play with you as always. Your life will be exactly like it was before, only it will now take place in two locales. The story may provide bland comfort to some worried children. But I suspect most know better. The story of the little bird in no way matches their experience of growing up in a divorced family, be it in one home, two homes, or any combination of living arrangements over the years.

The story is nevertheless important because it has deep roots in our contemporary culture. It describes several abiding myths that have guided our community opinions and policies for three decades. Up until thirty years ago marriage was a lifetime commitment with only a few narrow legal exits such as proving adultery in the courts or outwaiting years of abandonment. American cultural and legal attitudes bound marriages together, no matter how miserable couples might be. Countless individuals were locked in loveless marriages they desperately wanted to end, but for the most part they had no way out. Then, in an upheaval akin to a cataclysmic earthquake, family law in California changed overnight. A series of statewide task forces recommended that men and women seeking divorce should no longer be required to prove that their spouse was unfaithful, unfit, cruel, or incompatible. It was time, they said, to end the hypocrisy embodied in laws that severely restricted divorce. People should be able to end an unhappy marriage without proving fault or pointing blame.

The prevailing climate of opinion was that divorce would allow adults to make better choices and happier marriages by letting them undo earlier mistakes. They would arrive at an honest, mutual decision to divorce, because if one person wanted out, surely it could not be much of a marriage.

These attitudes were held by men and women of many political persuasions, by lawyers, judges, and mental health professionals alike. The final task force that formulated the new no-fault divorce laws was led by law professor Herma Kay, who was well known as an advocate for women's rights. In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan signed the new law and people were jubilant. It was a time of hope and faith that greater choice would set men and women free and benefit their children. Within a few years, no-fault divorce laws spread like wildfire to all fifty states. People all across the country were in favor of change.

But what about the children? In our rush to improve the lives of adults, we assumed that their lives would improve as well. We made radical changes in the family without realizing how it would change the experience of growing up. We embarked on a gigantic social experiment without any idea about how the next generation would be affected. If the truth be told, and if we are able to face it, the history of divorce in our society is replete with unwarranted assumptions that adults have made about children simply because such assumptions are congenial to adult needs and wishes. The myths that continue to guide our divorce policies and politics today stem directly from these attitudes.

Cherished Myths

TWO FAULTY BELIEFS provide the foundation for our current attitudes toward divorce. The first holds that if the parents are happier the children will be happier, too. Even if the children are distressed by the divorce, the crisis will be transient because children are resilient and resourceful and will soon recover. Children are not considered separately from their parents; their needs and even their thoughts are subsumed under the adult agenda. This "trickle down" myth is built on the enduring fact that most adults cannot fathom the child's world view and how children think. The problem is, they think they do. Indeed, many adults who are trapped in very unhappy marriages would be surprised to learn that their children are relatively content. They don't care if Mom and Dad sleep in different beds as long as the family is together.

Fortunately this myth has come under strong attack in recent years with reports from parents, teachers, and researchers like me who found that the children were suffering. The euphoria of the early 1970s soon gave way to a rising tide of concern about the impoverishment of women and children, the high distress among the many parents who did not agree with their spouse that their marriage was on the rocks, and the fact that children did not bounce back quickly. Children in postdivorce families do not, on the whole, look happier, healthier, or more well adjusted even if one or both parents are happier. National studies show that children from divorced and remarried families are more aggressive toward their parents and teachers. They experience more depression, have more learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems with peers than children from intact families. Children from divorced and remarried families are two to three times more likely to be referred for psychological help at school than their peers from intact families. More of them end up in mental health clinics and hospital settings. There is earlier sexual activity, more children born out of wedlock, less marriage, and more divorce. Numerous studies show that adult children of divorce have more psychological problems than those raised in intact marriages.

Although many people no longer believe the myth that children always benefit from a divorce that makes parents happier, it continues to exert subtle, unconscious influences on how we think about divorce and our reactions to it. It has encouraged parents to expect that their children will approve their decision. Actually, as you will see in the chapters that follow, this is hardly ever true for children who have not yet reached their teens. It has made it harder for parents to see or believe that their children suffer with fears and sadness after the breakup. And it has made it harder for parents to prepare their children properly for the forthcoming divorce and provide them with the comfort they need. The fact that many men and women get caught up in the search for new lovers or taxing new jobs after divorce -- both of which make parents less available to their children -- only serves to compound their desire to hold on to this myth.

A second myth is based on the premise that divorce is a temporary crisis that exerts its most harmful effects on parents and children at the time of the breakup. People who believe this leap to the happy conclusion that the key to the child's adjustment is the settlement of conflict without rancor. Thus the spotlight of our attention in terms of resources and interventions has been on the breakup. If the two parents don't fight, at least in front of the children, and if they rationally and fairly settle the financial, legal, and parenting issues that divide them, why then the crisis will resolve itself in short order. The two lucky adults will have broken free of their troubled marriage and, along with their children, can move forward to build happier lives. The children will resume their usual round of play and school activities. They will make the transition easily to having parents in two locales and dividing their days and nights between separate homes in different neighborhoods. Their lives will proceed as before, only much improved as compared to their experience in the predivorce family. This is all supposed to happen regardless of any betrayal, abuse, or abandonment that caused the divorce that left at least one person reeling in pain and one or both parents hardly capable of thinking clearly about their children. The belief that the crisis is temporary underlies the notion that if acceptable legal arrangements for custody, visiting, and child support are made at the time of the divorce and parents are provided with a few lectures, the child will soon be fine. It is a view we have fervently embraced and continue to hold.

But it's misguided. Our willingness to believe this notion has prevented us from giving children and adults the understanding they need to cope with the divorce experience over the long haul. It has kept us from making long-term plans for our children and from acknowledging the fact that their needs change as they grow older. It has prevented us from listening to their serious complaints and easing their suffering. Thankfully, this second myth is also beginning to unravel because of a new voice that is just now emerging on the national scene. That voice belongs to the children of divorce now grown to adulthood. In this book, you will hear them challenge these myths firsthand. Now that they are grown up, have marriages, divorces, and children of their own, they speak with an authority we dare not ignore.

Adult children of divorce are telling us loud and clear that their parents' anger at the time of the breakup is not what matters most. Unless there was violence or abuse or unremitting high conflict, they have dim memories of what transpired during this supposedly critical period. Indeed, as youngsters then and as adults now, all would be profoundly astonished to learn that any judge, attorney, mediator -- indeed, anyone at all -- had genuinely considered their best interests or wishes at the breakup or at any time since. It's the many years living in a postdivorce or remarried family that count, according to this first generation to come of age and tell us their experience. It's feeling sad, lonely, and angry during childhood. It's traveling on airplanes alone when you're seven to visit your parent. It's having no choice about how you spend your time and feeling like a second-class citizen compared with your friends in intact families who have some say about how they spend their weekends and their vacations. It's wondering whether you will have any financial help for college from your college-educated father, given that he has no legal obligation to pay. It's worrying about your mom and dad for years -- will her new boyfriend stick around, will his new wife welcome you into her home? It's reaching adulthood with acute anxiety. Will you ever find a faithful woman to love you? Will you find a man you can trust? Or will your relationships fail just like your parents' did? And most tellingly, it's asking if you can protect your own child from having these same experiences in growing up.

Not one of the men or women from divorced families whose lives I report on in this book wanted their children to repeat their childhood experiences. Not one ever said, "I want my children to live in two nests -- or even two villas." They envied friends who grew up in intact families. Their entire life stories belie the myths we've embraced.

The Longitudinal Study

THE ADULTS ON whom this work is based are among the vanguard of an ever increasing army of adults raised in divorced families. Since 1970, at least a million children a year have seen their parents divorce -- building a generation of Americans that has now come of age. It bears repeating that they represent a quarter of the adults in this country who have reached their forty-fourth birthdays. Demographers also report that 40 percent of all married adults in the 1990s have already been divorced. The lives of these children of divorce now grown to adulthood and the important lessons I have learned from them are the main topics of this book. It is the only study in the world that follows into full adulthood the life course of individuals whose parents separated when they were young children. From the beginning, my interest has been in the inner world of these people as they matured. I've tried to see the world through their eyes and to explore the quality of their relationships over many years with parents, stepparents, lovers, husbands, and finally their own children. As the study proceeded I became especially intrigued with the turning points along their life journey and with the ways they were finally able to overcome unexpected legacies from their parents' divorce.

The core group of 131 children and their families were recruited in 1971 when my colleague Joan Berlin Kelly and I began asking open-ended questions of families going through divorce. The children came from middle-class families and were carefully prescreened so that everyone chosen was doing reasonably well at school and was developmentally on target during the predivorce years. Naturally I wanted to be sure that any problems we saw did not predate the divorce. Neither they nor their parents were ever my patients. I have been following their lives in intimate detail, seeing them and both of their parents for many hours of interviews, at least every five years since 1971. My findings at the eighteen-month, five-, ten-, and fifteen-year marks were reported in two earlier books. At this, the twenty-five-year follow-up, I was able to locate close to 80 percent of the "children" in face-to-face interviews that each lasted several hours. They are now twenty-eight to forty-three years old.

This book also contains knowledge that I have gained from working with more than six thousand children and their parents who came to the Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition -- a nonprofit agency that since 1980 has provided mediation, counseling, and education for Marin County families going through divorce. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the staff and I have done pioneering research on a wide range of current issues, including joint custody, high-conflict families, overnight visiting for infants, and court-ordered visiting, and that research has influenced public policy and the courts and informed the work of pediatricians, teachers, and clergy. The center, which is nationally and internationally renowned, also provides training for legal and mental health professionals who work with families in separation, divorce, and remarriage.

Finally, this book draws on extended interviews with a comparison group of adults from intact families who were the same age and were raised in the same neighborhoods and schools as those in the long-term study of divorced families. My goal in comparing the two groups was to enable the growing up experience and adulthood of each group to stand out in bold relief. I soon found that intact families come in all shapes and sizes, ranging from harmonious to wretched. I was particularly interested in comparing the lives of those raised in troubled families that remained together with those in the divorced group. These comparisons shed light on the life of the child in a troubled family that did not divorce and provide a good basis for addressing the frequently asked question: for the sake of the children, is it better to divorce or to stay in an unhappy marriage?

What I Have Learned

WHEN I BEGAN studying the effects of divorce on children and parents in the early 1970s, I, like everyone else, expected them to rally. But as time progressed, I grew increasingly worried that divorce is a long-term crisis that was affecting the psychological profile of an entire generation. I caught glimpses of this long-term effect in my research that followed the children into late adolescence and early adulthood, but it's not until now -- when the children are fully grown -- that I can finally see the whole picture. Divorce is a life-transforming experience. After divorce, childhood is different. Adolescence is different. Adulthood -- with the decision to marry or not and have children or not -- is different. Whether the final outcome is good or bad, the whole trajectory of an individual's life is profoundly altered by the divorce experience.

We have been blinded to this fact by the sheer numbers of people affected and by the speed at which our society has been transformed. Many people today think divorce is a perfectly normal experience. It's so common, children hardly notice it. No stigma. No big deal. After all, if half the child's schoolmates come from divorced families, how could divorce be so traumatic? And isn't it true, they say, that children raised in bad intact families are no better off? Everyone who grows up in America today is affected directly or indirectly by divorce, so everyone has the same worries. In other words, they argue that divorce places no special burdens on individuals (remember, it's a normal experience). Indeed, if researchers were to compare groups of eighteen-year-olds from divorced and intact homes and then groups of twenty-two-year-olds and so forth they would probably find that most children of divorce and children from intact homes often hold similar views. It's true that most young people are worried about similar things.

But I have found what I think are deeper truths to this superficial impression. First, each child experiences divorce single file. Just because others are suffering does not reduce their suffering. Would it lessen a widow's sorrow to have five other widows on the same street? Would that make her feel less pain? Numbers provide no consolation for children or adults in many of life's traumas. People who believe that numbers mute the individual child's suffering have simply not talked to the children. Each child in a classroom half full of children of divorce cries out, "Why me?" Moreover, by following the life of one child of divorce, and then another and another, from early childhood through adolescence and into the challenges of adulthood, I can say without a doubt that they have worries apart from their peers raised in intact homes. These worries are reshaping our society in ways we never dreamt about. That is the subject of this book and a challenge to all of us in coming years.