Broken homes, and hearts.

Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce, by Elizabeth Marquardt (Crown, 191 pp., $24.95)

THE story told by first-time author Elizabeth Marquardt could easily have descended to the maudlin: just one more Gen-Xer relating the sad but not especially tragic course of her life. What saves her book, and turns it instead into a fresh, cogent, and compelling testimony, is the bonding of the author's personal story to solid, new social research. Marquardt shows "just how radical divorce really is," how it "powerfully changes the structure of childhood itself," and how growing up in a divorced family "is like growing up in a different culture." Indeed, in the wake of the no-fault-divorce revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s, one-quarter of all American young adults are now the children of divorce. She gives these hitherto silent millions a needed public voice.

Among the children affected by it, divorce has long been linked to significantly higher rates of school dropout, teenage pregnancy, illegal drug use, poor health, suicide attempts, and depression. Child abuse also thrives on divorce; research shows that having a step-parent in a child's home is "the most powerful predictor of severe child abuse." By intent, however, Marquardt gives relatively little attention to these deep pathologies. Instead, her focus is on the seemingly successful children of "good divorces." These are cases where parental conflicts over the children were minimal, where both parents stayed actively involved in their children's lives, and where the children went on to college. Alongside her own experience, she builds her argument on direct interviews with 71 young adults (ages 18 to 35), roughly half of whom grew up in divorced families and half in intact homes. She adds to this the results of a telephone survey (developed in cooperation with noted University of Texas sociologist Norval Glenn) of another 1,500 young adults, divided in similar fashion.

Marquardt's findings are persuasive, and disturbing. She blows the myth of the "good divorce" out of the water, labeling as "lies" the prevailing arguments that children are resilient and do just fine in a "low conflict" divorce or thrive in the pleasant diversity of "blended families." She shows that the children of "good" divorces "typically experience painful losses, moral confusion, spiritual suffering, [and] strained relationships." "Happy talk" about divorce, exemplified by Constance Ahrons's 1994 book The Good Divorce, exists to soothe adult consciences--those of therapists, lawyers, judges, and the divorcing parents themselves. For the children, however, the reality is pain and a deafening cultural silence.

The author's central and original argument is that divorce makes impossible a primary parental task: crafting a moral order. Married parents build a morally coherent and stable home through thousands of little negotiations and compromises between themselves, which smooth the way for their offspring and allow them to have and enjoy a childhood. In the divorced family, however, parents abandon this work. They may not be in open conflict, but they are also "no longer trying to make sense of the differences between their two different worlds." This task falls instead on their children. The result, Marquardt shows, is a permanent inner conflict over their parents' separate lives: "Children become travelers between two worlds," never feeling truly at home in either, at once outsiders and insiders in "shadow homes" lacking "elemental wholeness."

The children of divorce must grow up quickly, in some cases even taking on the role of the adult in a broken home. Other results for children include a heightened sense of being "not safe," the keeping of secrets from one or the other parent, loneliness, a feeling of loss, and a premature need to forge their own moralities.

The pervasive disorientation facing the children of divorce is revealed with particular poignancy when they confront the Gospel parable of the prodigal son. In Marquardt's interviews with those who grew up in intact homes, the focus is on the end of the story, when, despite all his mistakes, the son is embraced by his father's love. Among young adults from divorced families, however, attention focuses on the beginning, but with the roles reversed: "The story is not about the prodigal son but the prodigal parents."

The book loses momentum only when it turns to recommendations. From beginning to end, Marquardt insists that she is not anti-divorce: "Divorce is a vital option for ending very bad marriages." She rejects the most recent innovation in divorce law regarding children--the presumption of joint custody--as "extremely disturbing," an option that "burdens children even more than other types of arrangements." Her alternative is to continue giving judges and parents "wide discretion" on custody arrangements, which promises little improvement. In the end, her agenda for change becomes a somewhat desperate call for more "mothers and fathers, living together, married to each other, preferably getting along well" and, if they do break up, honest public recognition of the "loss" facing their children.

This modest response is unfortunate. To begin with, the author underestimates the degree to which divorce has become an industry, driven by lawyers, social workers, psychologists, and even government officials, with large financial interests in broken homes. Moreover, the law has much more potential to serve marriage and children than she admits. Over 200 years ago, French statesman Louis de Bonald wrote a treatise On Divorce, arguing against the "no fault" statute of his day. He noted that the state "intervenes in the spouses' contract of union because it represents the unborn child ... and because it accepts the commitment made by the spouses ... under its guarantee to bring that child into being." Bonald adds that civil marriage "is truly a contract between three persons, two of whom are present, one of whom (the [potential] child) is absent, but is represented by public power, guarantor of the commitment made by the two spouses to form a society."

American law now fails to protect that all-important little society, and so fails the children of divorce. One clear solution is to strengthen the law, to favor the maintenance of marriage and to discourage divorce. The pre-1969 system requiring the finding of "fault" in the latter had the virtue of underscoring the public interest in a marriage. As Marquardt so ably shows, the "no fault" revolution has been an obvious failure when it comes to protecting children. (Other research has revealed that the introduction of "no fault" actually produced more divorces than would otherwise have occurred, and has failed to reduce conflict during divorce proceedings, merely shifting its focus.) We should undo the "revolution," making divorce more difficult and (at least when children are present) treating it once again as an indirect crime against the social order, where the instigator must bear guilt and suffer a consequence. We should do this for the sake of parents, who will gain incentives to carry them over the rough spots and to repair rather than discard their marriages; and, most certainly, we should do this for the sake of the children.

Mr. Carlson is president of the Howard Center in Rockford, Ill., and distinguished fellow in family-policy studies at the Family Research Council. His most recent book is Fractured Generations: Crafting a Family Policy for Twenty-First Century America(Transaction).