Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce

The past few decades have seen the development of an upbeat and comforting concept called “the good divorce.” 

A number of books have been written that say the real damage is not in the divorce itself, but in how the divorce unfolds. They give useful tips on how to do the least amount of damage to the kids. In fact, some say a good divorce can be better for a child than a rocky marriage.

Elizabeth Marquardt is a child of a good divorce. Her parents spoke well of each other and worked hard not to dump their burdens on their young child. But as Marquardt grew up, the idea of a good divorce rang hollow for her. She wasn’t depressed or rebellious, and she felt loved by both parents, but she didn’t feel whole either.

With a grant from the Lily Foundation, she developed a nationwide study of 1,500 randomly selected adults between 18 and 35 to see if the statistical findings would confirm or conflict with her own experience. The results are revealed in her book Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.

She argues that the pendulum needs to swing back toward an understanding that divorce has more than a time-limited, mild impact on most children.

“While a ‘good divorce’ is better than a bad divorce, it’s still not good,” she writes. Many of the consequences inherent in a child’s divided life cannot be avoided, even by dedicated parents.

“Divorce,” Marquardt writes, “powerfully changes the structure of childhood itself.”

The study’s statistics—listed completely in the back of the book—offer some compelling information that should be added to the nation’s sometimes-heated debate about divorce. For example, children of divorce are three times more likely to say, “I was alone a lot as a child,” and three times more likely to say, “I love my mother, but I don’t respect her.”

Marquardt discovered that, on average, children whose parents were unhappy, who “fell out of love,” or who were in consistent-but-not-dangerous conflict were more likely to do well in adulthood if their parents stayed together.

“The children of low-conflict couples fare far worse after divorce,” she writes. “To outsiders, we looked improbably grown up, even charmingly mature. But inside, we dealt with feelings of detachment and division for years to come.”

The book is great at painting a picture of reality, but short on offering solutions. Its primary plea is for parents in low-conflict marriages (about two-thirds of all divorces by her definition) to consider sticking it out.

In addition, the book is useful for youth workers like me who have never lived through a divorce in their family.

Through statistics and stories, the book explains the jarring impact of traveling between two worlds, of keeping your parents’ secrets, and of loss and loneliness. The research also showed the impact on a child’s spiritual and moral development. Synthesizing mom and dad’s distinct worldviews—a task that usually belongs to parents—is now shouldered by the child.

Although we know that parents are scripturally and statistically the main influencers of a child’s faith, the research indicated that a strong faith is something children of divorce are more likely to discover outside of their family. For example, they are eight times less likely to say, “My father taught me clearly the difference between right and wrong.”

Marquardt isn’t expecting all couples to stay married—some people really need that escape from a dangerous situation. But Marquardt hopes to help unhappy married couples have a more realistic understanding of the decision they’re considering. And to the rest of us, she hopes to speak for a large portion of her generation when she says, “Please understand our experience.”