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Not rigorous enough. Too gloomy. Those are the leading raps against Wallerstein. Paul Amato, a sociology professor at Penn State, has researched divorce and children for 20 years, casting the sort of wide statistical net that hardheaded academics favor and Wallerstein eschews as too impersonal. While Amato agrees with her about divorce's "sleeper effect" on children--the problems that crop up only after they're grown--he finds her work a bit of a bummer. "It's a dismal kind of picture that she paints," he says. "What most of the large-scale, more scientific research shows is that although growing up in a divorced family elevates the risk for certain kinds of problems, it by no means dooms children to having a terrible life."
And what about children raised from the start by single moms? Last month, TIME ran a story about the challenges faced by single women having children of their own. But in all the coverage about how those women are coping, the impact on the kids is sometimes underplayed--and their issues are not that different from those of kids from divorced households. "Some studies have directly compared children who were raised by mothers who are continuously single with mothers who went through a divorce," says Amato. "In general, the outcomes for children seem to be pretty similar. It appears to increase the risk for some types of problems: in conduct, in school, in social relations. Neither one appears to be optimal for children."
Besides her conclusions on children's long-term prospects following divorce, Wallerstein makes another major point in her book--one that may result in talk-show fistfights. Here it is: children don't need their parents to like each other. They don't even need them to be especially civil. They need them to stay together, for better or worse. (Paging Dr. Laura!) This imperative comes with asterisks, of course, but fewer than one might think. Physical abuse, substance addiction and other severe pathologies cannot be tolerated in any home. Absent these, however, Wallerstein stands firm: a lousy marriage, at least where the children's welfare is concerned, beats a great divorce.
Them's fighting words.
The shouting has already started. Family historian Stephanie Coontz, author of The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic) questions the value of papering over conflicts for the kids' sake. Sure, some parents can pull it off, but how many and for how long? "For many couples," Coontz says, "things only get worse and fester, and eventually, five years down the road, they end up getting divorced anyway, after years of contempt for each other and outside affairs."
Coontz doesn't believe in social time travel. She doesn't think we can go back to Leave It to Beaver after we've seen Once and Again. Unlike Wallerstein, whose investigation is deep but rather narrow (the families in her original study were all white, affluent residents of the same Northern California county, including non-working wives for whom divorce meant a huge upheaval), Coontz takes a lofty, long view of divorce. "In the 1940s the average marriage ended with the death of the spouse," Coontz says. "But life expectancy is greater today, and there is more potential for trouble in a marriage. We have to become comfortable with the complexity and ambiguity of every family situation and its own unique needs."