DAN QUAYLE WAS RIGHT

(continued, third segment)

Five years after divorce more than a third of the children experienced moderate or severe depression.  At ten years a significant number of the now young men and women appeared to be troubled, drifting, and under-achieving.  At fifteen years many of the thirtyish adults were struggling to establish strong love relationships of their own.  In short, far from recovering from their parents' divorce, a significant percentage of these grownups were still suffering from its effects.  In fact, according to Wallerstein, the long-term effects of divorce emerge at a time when young adults are trying to make their own decisions about love, marriage, and family.  Not all children in the study suffered negative consequences.  But Wallerstein's research presents a sobering picture of divorce.  "The child of divorce faces many additional psychological burdens in addition to the normative tasks of growing up," she says.

Divorce not only makes it more difficult for young adults to establish new relationships.  It also weakens the oldest primary relationship: that between parent and child.  According to Wallerstein, "Parent-child relationships are permanently altered by divorce in ways that our society has not anticipated."  Not only do children experience a loss of parental attention at the onset of divorce, but they soon find that at every stage of their development their parents are not available in the same way they once were.  "In a reasonably happy intact family," Wallerstein observes, "the child gravitates first to one parent and then to the other, using skills and attributes from each in climbing the developmental ladder."  In a divorced family, children find it "harder to find the needed parent at needed times."  This may help explain why very young children suffer the most as the result of family disruption.  Their opportunities to engage in this kind of ongoing process are the most truncated and compromised.

The father-child bond is severely, often irreparably, damaged in disrupted families.  In a situation without historical precedent, an astonishing and disheartening number of American fathers are failing to provide financial support to their children. Often, more than the father's support check is missing.  Increasingly, children are bereft of any contact with their fathers.  According to the National Survey of Children, in disrupted families only one child in six, on average, saw his or her father as often as once a week in the past year.  Close to half did not see their father at all in the past year.  As time goes on, contact becomes even more infrequent.  Ten years after a marriage breaks up, more than two thirds of children report not having seen their father for a year.  Not surprisingly, when asked to make the "adults you look up to and admire," only 20 percent of children in single-parent families named their father, as compared with 52 percent of children in two-parent families.  A favorite complaint among Baby Boom Americans is that their fathers were emotionally remote guys who worked hard, came home at night to eat supper, and didn't have much to say to or do with the kinds.  But the current generation has a far worse father problem: many of their fathers are vanishing entirely.

Even for fathers who maintain regular contact, the pattern of father-child relationships changes.  The sociologists Andrew Cherlin and Frank Furstenberg, who have studied broken families, write that the fathers behave more like other relatives than like parents.  Rather than helping with homework or carrying out a project with their children, nonresidential fathers are likely to take the kids shopping, to the movies, or out to dinner.  Instead of providing steady advice and guidance, divorced fathers become "treat" dads.

Apparently -- and paradoxically -- it is the visiting relationship itself, rather than the frequency of visits, that is the real source of the problem.  According to Wallerstein, the few children in the California study who reported visiting with their fathers once or twice a week over a ten-year period still felt rejected.  The need to schedule a special time to be with the child, the repeated leave-takings, and the lack of connection to the child's regular, daily schedule leaves many fathers adrift, frustrated, and confused.  Wallerstein calls the visiting father a parent without portfolio.

The deterioration in father-child bonds is most severe among children who experience divorce at an early age, according to a recent study.  Nearly three quarters of the respondents, now young men and women, report having poor relationships with their fathers.  Close to half have received psychological help, nearly a third have dropped out of high school, and about a quarter report having experienced high levels of problem behavior or emotional distress by the time they became young adults.

Since most children live with their mothers after divorce, one might expect that the mother-child bond would remain unaltered and might even be strengthened.  Yet research shows that the mother-child bond is also weakened as the result of divorce. Only half of the children who were close to their mothers before a divorce remained equally close after the divorce.  Boys, particularly, had difficulties with their mothers.  Moreover, mother-child relationships deteriorated over time.  Whereas teenagers in disrupted families were no more likely than teenagers in intact families to report poor relationships with their mothers, 30 percent of young adults from disrupted families have poor relationships with their mothers, as compared with 16 percent of young adults from intact families.  Mother-daughter relationships often deteriorate as the daughter reaches young adulthood.  The only group in society that derives any benefit from these weakened parent-child ties is the therapeutic community.  Young adults from disrupted families are nearly twice as likely as those from intact families to receive psychological help.

Some social scientists have criticized Judith Wallerstein's research because her study is based on a small clinical sample and does not include a control group of children from intact families.  However, other studies generally support and strengthen her findings.  Nicholas Zill has found similar long-term effects on children of divorce, reporting that "effects of marital discord and family disruption are visible twelve to twenty-two years later in poor relationships with parents, high levels of problem behavior, and an increased likelihood of dropping out of high school and receiving psychological help."  Moreover, Zill's research also found signs of distress in young women who seemed relatively well adjusted in middle childhood and adolescence.  Girls in single-parent families are also at much greater risk for precocious sexuality, teenage marriage, teenage pregnancy, nonmarital birth, and divorce than are girls in two-parent families.

Zill's research shows that family disruption strongly affects school achievement as well.  Children in disrupted families are nearly twice as likely as those in intact families to drop out of high school; among children who do drop out, those from disrupted families are less likely eventually to earn a diploma or a GED.  Boys are at greater risk for dropping out than girls, and are also more likely to exhibit aggressive, acting-out behaviors.  Other research confirms these findings.  According to a study by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 33 percent of two-parent elementary school students ranked as high achievers, as compared with 17 percent of single-parent students.  The children in single-parent families are also more likely to be truant or late or to have disciplinary action taken against them.  Even after controlling for race, income, and religion, scholars find significant differences in educational attainment between children who grow up in intact families and children who do not.  In his 1992 study America's Smallest School: The Family, Paul Barton shows that the proportion of two-parent families varies widely from state to state and is related to variations in academic achievement.  North Dakota, for example, scores highest on the two-parent-family scale.  The District of Columbia is second lowest on the math scale and lowest in the nation on the two-parent-family scale.

Zill notes that "while coming from a disrupted family significantly increases a young adult's risks of experiencing social, emotional or academic difficulties, it does not foreordain such difficulties.  The majority of young people from disrupted families have successfully completed high school, do not currently display high levels of emotional distress or problem behavior, and enjoy reasonable relationships with their mothers."  Nevertheless, a majority of these young adults do show maladjustment in their relationships with their fathers.

These findings underscore the importance of both a mother and a father in fostering the emotional well-being of children.  Obviously, not all children in two-parent families are free from emotional turmoil, but few are burdened with the troubles that accompany family breakup.  Moreover, as the sociologist Amitai Etzioni explains in a new book, The Spirit of Community, two parents in an intact family make up what might be called a mutually supportive education coalition.  When both parents are present, they can play different, even contradictory, roles.  One parent may goad the child to achieve, while the other may encourage the child to take time out to daydream or toss a football around.  One may emphasize taking intellectual risks, while the other may insist on following the teacher's guidelines.  At the same time, the parents regularly exchange information about the child's school problems and achievements, and have a sense of the overall educational mission.  However, Etzioni writes,

Perhaps the most striking, and potentially disturbing, new research has to do with children in stepparent families.  Until quite recently the optimistic assumption was that children saw their lives improve when they became part of a stepfamily.  When Nicholas Zill and his colleagues began to study the effects of remarriage on children, their working hypothesis was that stepparent families would make up for the shortcomings of the single-parent family.  Clearly, most children are better off economically when they are able to share in the income of two adults.  When a second adult joins the household, there may be a reduction in the time and work pressures on the single parent.

The research overturns this optimistic assumption, however.  In general the evidence suggests that remarriage neither reproduces nor restores the intact family structure, even when it brings more income and a second adult into the household.  Quite the contrary.  Indeed, children living with stepparents appear to be even more disadvantaged than children living in a stable single-parent family.  Other difficulties seem to offset the advantages of extra income and an extra pair of hands.  However much our modern sympathies reject the fairy-tale portrait of stepparents, the latest research confirms that the old stories are anthropologically quite accurate.  Stepfamilies disrupt established loyalties, create new uncertainties, provoke deep anxieties, and sometimes threaten a child's physical safety as well as emotional security.

Parents and children have dramatically different interests in and expectations for a new marriage.  For a single parent, remarriage brings new commitments, the hope of enduring love and happiness, and relief from stress and loneliness.  For a child, the same event often provokes confused feelings of sadness, anger, and rejection.  Nearly half the children in Wallerstein's study said they felt left out in their stepfamilies.  The National Commission on Children, a bipartisan group headed by Senator John D. Rockefeller, of West Virginia, reported that children from stepfamilies were more likely to say they often felt lonely or blue than children from either single-parent or intact families.  Children in stepfamilies were the most likely to report that they wanted more time with their mothers.  When mothers remarry, daughters tend to have a harder time adjusting than sons.  Evidently, boys often respond positively to a male presence in the household, while girls who have established close ties to their mother in a single-parent family often see the stepfather as a rival and an intruder.  According to one study, boys in remarried families are less likely to drop out of school than boys in single-parent families, while the opposite is true for girls.

A large percentage of children do not even consider stepparents to be part of their families, according to the National Survey on Children.  The NSC asked children, "When you think of your family, who do you include>" Only 10 percent of the children failed to mention a biological parent, but a third left out a stepparent.  Even children who rarely saw their noncustodial parents almost always named them as family members.  The weak sense of attachment is mutual.  When parents were asked the same question, only one percent failed to mention a biological child, while 15 percent left out a stepchild.  In the same study stepparents with both natural children and stepchildren said that it was harder for them to love their stepchildren than their biological children and that their children would have been better off if they had grown up with two biological parents.

One of the most severe risks associated with stepparent-child ties is the risk of sexual abuse.  As Judith Wallerstein explains, "The presence of a stepfather can raise the difficult issue of a thinner incest barrier."  The incest taboo is strongly reinforced, Wallerstein says, by knowledge of paternity and by the experience of caring for a child since birth.  A stepfather enters the family without either credential and plays a sexual role as the mother's husband.  As a result, stepfathers can pose a sexual risk to the children, especially to daughters.  According to a study by the Canadian researchers Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, preschool children in stepfamilies are forty times as likely as children in intact families to suffer physical or sexual abuse.  (Most of the sexual abuse was committed by a third party, such as a neighbor, a stepfather's male friend, or another nonrelative.)  Stepfathers discriminate in their abuse: they are far more likely to assault nonbiological children than their own natural children.

Sexual abuse represents the most extreme threat to children's well-being.  Stepfamilies also seem less likely to make the kind of ordinary investments in the children that other families do.  Although it is true that the stepfamily household has a higher income than the single-parent household, it does not follow that the additional income is reliably available to the children.  To begin with, children's claim on stepparents' resources is shaky.  Stepparents are not legally required to support stepchildren, so their financial support of these children is entirely voluntary.  Moreover, since stepfamilies are far more likely to break up than intact families, particularly in the first five years, there is always the risk -- far greater than the risk of unemployment in an intact family -- that the second income will vanish with another divorce.  The financial commitment to a child's education appears weaker in stepparent families, perhaps because the stepparent believes that the responsibility for educating the child rests with the biological parent.

Similar studies suggest that even though they may have the time, the parents in stepfamilies do not invest as much of it in their children as the parents in intact families or even single parents to.  A 1991 survey by the National Commission in Children showed that the parents in stepfamilies were less likely to be involved in a child's school life, including involvement in extracurricular activities, than either intact-family parents or single parents.  They were the least likely to report being involved in such time-consuming activities as coaching a child's team, accompanying class trips, or helping with school projects.  According to McLanahan's research, children in stepparent families report lower educational aspirations on the part of their parents and lower levels of parental involvement with schoolwork.  In short, it appears that family income and the number of adults in the household are not the only factors affecting children's well-being.

There are several reasons for this diminished interest and investment.  In the law, as in the children's eyes, stepparents are shadowy figures.  According to the legal scholar David Chambers, family law has pretty much ignored stepparents.  Chambers writes, "In the substantial majority of states, stepparents, even when they live with a child, have no legal obligation to contribute to the child's support; nor does a stepparent's presence in the home alter the support obligations of a noncustodial parent.  The stepparent also has . . . no authority to approve emergency medical treatment or even to sign a permission slip . . . ."  When a marriage breaks up, the stepparent has no continuing obligation to provide for a stepchild, no matter how long or how much he or she has been contributing to the support of the child.  In short, Chambers says, stepparent relationships are based wholly on consent, subject to the inclinations of the adult and the child.  The only way a stepparent can acquire the legal status of a parent is through adoption.  Some researchers also point to the cultural ambiguity of the stepparent's role as a source of diminished interest, while others insist that it is the absence of a blood tie that weakens the bond between stepparent and child.

Whatever its causes, the diminished investment in children in both single-parent and stepparent families has a significant impact on their life chances.  Take parental help with college costs.  The parents in intact families are far more likely to contribute to children's college costs than are those in disrupted families.  Moreover, they are usually able to arrive at a shared understanding of which children will go to college, where they will go, how much the parents will contribute, and how much the children will contribute.  But when families break up, these informal understandings can vanish.  The issue of college tuition remains one of the most contested areas of parental support, especially for higher-income parents.

The law does not step in even when familial understandings break down.  In the 1980s many states lowered the age covered by child-support agreements from twenty-one to eighteen, thus eliminating college as a cost associated with support for a minor child.  Consequently, the question of college tuition is typically not addressed in child-custody agreements.  Even in states where the courts do require parents to contribute to college costs, the requirement may be in jeopardy.  In a recent decision in Pennsylvania the court overturned an earlier decision ordering divorced parents to contribute to college tuition.  This decision is likely to inspire challenges in other states where courts have required parents to pay for college.  Increasingly, help in paying for college is entirely voluntary.

Judith Wallerstein has been analyzing the educational decisions of the college-age men and women in her study.  She reports that "a full 42 percent of these men and women from middle class families appeared to have ended their educations without attempting college or had left college before achieving a degree at either the two-year or the four-year level."  A significant percentage of these young people have the ability to attend college.  Typical of this group are Nick and Terry, sons of a college professor.  They had been close to their father before the divorce, but their father remarried soon after the divorce and saw his sons only occasionally, even though he lived nearby.  At age nineteen Nick had completed a few junior-college courses and was earning a living as a salesman.  Terry, twenty-one, who had been tested as a gifted student, was doing blue-collar work irregularly.

Sixty-seven percent of the college-age students from disrupted families attended college, as compared with 85 percent of other students who attended the same high schools.  Of those attending college, several had fathers who were financially capable of contributing to college costs but did not.

The withdrawal of support for college suggests that other customary forms of parental help-giving, too, may decline as the result of family breakup.  For example, nearly a quarter of first-home purchases since 1980 have involved help from relatives, usually parents.  The median amount of help is $5,000.  It is hard to imagine that parents who refuse to contribute to college costs will offer help in buying first homes, or help in buying cars or health insurance for young adult family members.  And although it is too soon to tell, family disruption may affect the generational transmission of wealth.  Baby Boomers will inherit their parents' estates, some substantial, accumulated over a lifetime by parents who lived and saved together.  To be sure, the postwar generation benefitted from an expanding economy and a rising standard of living, but its ability to accumulate wealth also owed something to family stability.  The lifetime assets, like the marriage itself, remained intact.  It is unlikely that the children of disrupted families will be in so favorable a position.

Moreover, children from disrupted families may be less likely to help their aging parents.  The sociologist Alice Rossi, who has studied intergenerational patterns of help-giving, says that adult obligation has its roots in early-childhood experience. Children who grow up in intact families experience higher levels of obligation to kin than children from broken families.  Children's sense of obligation to a nonresidential father is particularly weak.  Among adults with both parents living, those separated from their father during childhood are less likely than others to see the father regularly.  Half of them see their father more than once a year, as compared with nine out of ten of those whose parents are still married.  Apparently a kind of bitter justice is at work here.  Fathers who do not support or see their young children may not be able to count on their adult children's support when they are old and need money, love, and attention.

In short, as Andrew Cherlin and Frank Furstenburg put it, "Through divorce and remarriage, individuals are related to more and more people, to each of whom they owe less and less."  Moreover, as Nicholas Zill argues, weaker parent-child attachments leave many children more strongly exposed to influences outside the family, such as peers, boyfriends or girlfriends, and the media.  Although these outside forces can sometimes be helpful, common sense and research opinion argue against putting too much faith in peer groups or the media as surrogates for Mom and Dad.

Family disruption would be a serious problem even if it affected only individual children and families.  But the impact is far broader.  Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to characterize it as a central cause of many of our most vexing social problems.  Consider three problems that most Americans believe rank among the nation's pressing concerns: poverty, crime, and declining school performance.

More than half of the increase in child poverty in the 1980s is attributable to changes in family structure, according to David Eggebeen and Daniel Lichter, of Pennsylvania State University.  In fact, if family structure in the United States had remained relatively constant since 1960, the rate of child poverty would be a third lower than it is today.  This does not bode well for the future.  With more than half of today's children likely to live in single-parent families, poverty and associated welfare costs threaten to become even heavier burdens on the nation.

Crime in American cities has increased dramatically and grown more violent over recent decades.  Much of this can be attributed to the rise in disrupted families.  Nationally, more than 70 percent of all juveniles in state reform institutions come from fatherless homes.  A number of scholarly studies find that even after the groups of subjects are controlled for income, boys from single-mother homes are significantly more likely than others to commit crimes and wind up in the juvenile justice, court, and penitentiary systems.  One such study summarizes the relationship[ between crime and one-parent families this way: "The relationship is so strong that controlling for family configuration erases the relationship between race and crime and between low income and crime.  This conclusion shows up time and again in the literature."  The nation's mayors, as well as police officers, social workers, probation officers, and court officials, consistently point to family breakup as the most important source of rising rates of crime.

Terrible as poverty and crime are, they tend to be concentrated in inner cities and isolated from the everyday experience of many Americans.  The same cannot be said of the problem of declining school performance.  Nowhere has the impact of family breakup been more profound or widespread than in the nation's public schools.  There is a strong consensus that the schools are failing in their historic mission to prepare every American child to be a good worker and a good citizen.  And nearly everyone agrees that the schools must undergo dramatic reform in order to reach that goal.  In pursuit of that goal, moreover, we have suffered no shortage of bright ideas or pilot projects or bold experiments in school reform.  But there is little evidence that measures such as curricular reform, school-based management, and school choice will address, let alone solve, the biggest problem schools face: the rising number of children who come from disrupted families.

The great educational tragedy of our time is that many American children are failing in school not because they are intellectually or physically impaired but because they are emotionally incapacitated.  In schools across the nation principals report a dramatic rise in the aggressive, acting-out behavior characteristic of children, especially boys, who are living in single-parent families.  The discipline problems in today's suburban schools -- assaults on teachers, unprovoked attacks on other students, screaming outbursts in class -- outstrip the problems that were evident in the toughest city schools a generation ago.  Moreover, teachers find many children emotionally distracted, so upset and preoccupied by the explosive drama of their own family lives that they are unable to concentrate on such mundane matters as multiplication tables.

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