Word: moms
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...America's children of divorce--a million new ones every year--unfinished business is a way of life. For adults, divorce is a conclusion, but for children it's the beginning of uncertainty. Where will I live? Will I see my friends again? Will my mom's new boyfriend leave her too? Going back to the early '70s--the years that demographers mark as the beginning of a divorce boom that has receded only slightly despite three decades of hand wringing and worry--society has debated these children's predicament in much the same way that angry parents...
...well-adjusted children, which--as, according to virtually every family researcher who has worked with larger and more representative samples than Wallerstein's tiny handful--the vast majority of kids of divorce turn out to be. We've learned a lot about how to divorce since l971. When Mom has enough money and Dad stays connected, when parents stay civil and don't bad-mouth each other, kids do all right. The "good enough" divorce--why isn't that ever the cover story...
...them to see their lives through that lens. What if she had spent as much time studying children whose parents had terrible marriages but stayed together for the kids? How many 35-year-old "children" would be blaming their problems on the nights they hid in their rooms while Mom and Dad screamed at each other in the kitchen? Wallerstein points out that many children of divorce feel overly responsible for their parents' happiness. But what about the burden of knowing that one or both of your parents endured years of misery...
...matter of fact, we know the answer to that question. The baby boomers, who helped divorce become mainstream, were the products of exactly the kind of marriages the anti-divorcers approve of--the child-centered unions of the l950s, when parents, especially Mom, sacrificed themselves on the altar of family values and suburban respectability. To today's anti-divorcers those may seem like "good enough" marriages--husband and wife rubbing along for the sake of the children. The kids who lived with the silence and contempt said no thank...
...family transmits itself vertically through time; the sort of great change we have witnessed occurs on the horizontal - a powerful wave moving on a broad front through time and smashing aside all kinds of sustaining or stultifying precedents (Dad in the office, Mom in the kitchen, gays in the closet...) We have abandoned the vertical (back through time) in favor of the headlong horizontal...