Third Thoughts on Divorce.

For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered, by E. Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly (Norton, 307 pp., $26.95)

E. Mavis Hetherington is one of the nation's most respected research psychologists. Her new book (with writer John Kelly) has been marketed as a rebuttal to divorce critics, who -- she believes -- have overestimated the negative effects of divorce and downplayed its benefits.

All the headlines have gone to Hetherington's bottom line: The majority of children of divorce, she reassures worried parents, are functioning in the normal range 20 years later: "Most were successfully going about the chief tasks of young adulthood: establishing careers, creating intimate relationships, building meaningful lives."

But E. Mavis Hetherington is too good a scholar to have 20 years of research summed up in sound bites. This book is a report for lay readers on three different -- and important -- long-running studies designed to assess the effects of divorce. The studies ultimately involved 1,400 families; in other words, when it comes to the case against the case against divorce, this is as good as it gets.

How good is that?

Adults, first. Men and women divorced for different reasons, says Hetherington. Women complained about lack of intimacy and affection; men complained about lack of sex and overly critical wives. Infidelity, abuse, and alcoholism were present, but in a minority of divorces.

Adults choose to divorce, then, not mostly to escape from violent hellholes, but because they are lonely, bored, depressed, dissatisfied. How often does divorce deliver on its seductive promise of a better life? Hetherington's sample consists mostly of white, middle-class, and relatively well-educated men and women. Yet even among this advantaged group, the answer is: Surprisingly seldom.

Hetherington judges that 20 years after a divorce, only about 20 percent of divorced individuals (most of them women) were Enhancers, whose lives were improved by the divorce. Another 10 percent became what Hetherington calls Competent Loners -- whether divorce improved their lives is not clear. For about 40 percent, divorce was a tumult that made no difference: "Different partners, different marriages, but usually the same problems." The remaining 30 percent were in various stages of just plain miserable: Hetherington uses words like "desperately unhappy," "empty, pointless," "clinically depressed," "joyless," and "embittered" to describe how they felt about their lives.

Casual sex had a particularly negative effect on divorced women, notes Hetherington. The seven suicides she observed were all women and all triggered (she tells us) by casual sex. Men got bored with casual sex, too, but it took them two years, on average. (The ennui of meaningless sex eventually drove many a man to remarriage, but never to suicide.)

How good, then, is divorce for adults? Hetherington's work is peppered with data that are far from reassuring. Sentences like this, for example: "Behaviors like Peeping Tomism and harassing birds are worrisome, but they are also fairly normal in the first year after a divorce, as are erratic mood swings, vulnerability to psychological disorders and physical illness, and doubts about the decision to leave." Those who have entered the wacky world where Peeping Toms and bird assaults are fairly normal will no doubt be relieved to know there is a light at the end of the tunnel; the rest of us may be forgiven for thinking that jumping down that particular black hole sounds even less fun than one imagined.

What about the divorced people who were better off in the long run -- what made the difference for them? The answer, ironically, is marriage. Hetherington found that "people in long-lasting, gratifying first and second marriages were better off economically, and had the lowest rates of depression, substance abuse, conduct disorders, health complaints, and visits to the doctor" -- along with a more satisfying sex life.

Hetherington's study thus confirms the research of others on the critical importance of a good-enough marriage to adult well-being. But something about contemporary mores is seriously undermining the road to a good marriage. Only one-third of the grown children Hetherington studied (from intact and disrupted families) who were in the first seven years of marriage were very happily married, compared to over half of their parents at that stage; 38 percent reported facing a serious marital problem, compared to 20 percent of their parents at the same juncture. A good marriage is as important as it ever was, but apparently younger Americans are finding it harder and harder to achieve. That's the upshot of Hetherington's study insofar as it concerns adults. But what about the kids? Should parents contemplating divorce relax?

On this issue, the results reported in For Better or for Worse are consistent with a large and growing social-science literature: Even among advantaged, middle-class white children, divorce doubles the risk that 20 years later the grown children will experience serious social, emotional, and/or psychological dysfunction. "Twenty-five percent of youths from divorced families in comparison to 10 percent from non-divorced families did have serious social, emotional, or psychological problems." Money didn't matter: Even when family incomes were similar, children from disrupted homes had more long-term dysfunction.

Three-quarters of children of divorce do function normally; does that mean the glass is only one-quarter empty? It is important to recognize the limitations inherent in the definition of damage Hetherington uses. Many children who are functioning in the normal range psychologically may be suffering in other ways. A child who does not go to a good college because her parents divorced is functioning in the normal range, for example. The 35 percent of girls in remarried homes who started menstruating before age 12 (compared to 18 percent of girls from intact homes) are certainly functioning normally. The increased risk of premature sex, sexually transmitted diseases, and teen pregnancy in children of divorce is mentioned by Hetherington, but only in passing.

Children of divorce in this study also had roughly double the divorce rate of children from low-conflict intact families, and a higher divorce risk even than children raised in unhappy marriages. Why? A lower commitment to marital permanence and fewer relationship skills, says Hetherington. Seventy percent of children of divorce who married had relatively permissive views of divorce, compared to 40 percent of spouses from intact families. Their best chance of marital success was to marry a child from an intact family.

One of the most consistent effects of divorce, even in white middle-class kids, was estrangement from the father. Very few of the highly educated and successful divorced men figured out how to be effective fathers outside of marriage. Twenty years later, about two-thirds of boys and three-quarters of girls had poor relationships with their fathers -- compared to 30 percent of children from intact marriages.

The most poignant moment in the book is when Hetherington admits that "at the end of my study, a fair number of my adult children of divorce described themselves as permanently 'scarred.' But objective assessments of these 'victims' told a different story." What counts as damage has to be on Prof. Hetherington's checklist of dysfunctions defined by answers to multiple- choice questionnaires. The advantage, of course, is that these kinds of assessments are less likely to be influenced by the investigator's bias; but the equally obvious disadvantage is an enormous loss of sensitivity. When children of divorce try to tell Hetherington their own stories of more subtle, lingering emotional difficulties, she dismisses these as "self- fulfilling prophecy." If you have a job and a girlfriend, but you do not have your dad, does that count as damage? Not in Hetherington's book: You are functioning in the normal range, end of story.

Why would a top scholar such as Hetherington, whose own work recapitulates and confirms a growing consensus on the potential long-term negative effects of divorce, choose to minimize these effects in presenting her research to the public? Partly it is because she has a genuine admiration and respect for the personal growth divorce sometimes prompts, especially in women: Divorce winners do exist, most of them women who rise to meet and beat the considerable challenges divorce poses for mothers. Partly it is because Hetherington has defined down the damage caused by divorce, so that it includes only those consequences that can be categorized as social-science pathologies.

Certainly children of divorce need to know they are not damaged goods; human beings can rise above their circumstances. And certainly men and women who are already divorced need good advice on how to minimize the damage and maximize their opportunities. But the potential danger stemming from Hetherington's well-meaning message of encouragement is what it may convey to parents: Go ahead and divorce, your kids will do fine. For concerned parents contemplating divorce, the news that 20 years later one-fourth of kids are seriously dysfunctional surely cannot be treated as good news. In no other context would responsible parents say, "Gee, only a one out of four chance I will permanently damage my child? Go for it!"

But by framing the data in these terms, Hetherington raises an even deeper question: How much pain are parents entitled to inflict on their children, simply because their children may rise above it and avoid long-term psychological dysfunction? Like scholar Judith Wallerstein before her, Hetherington finds that even when divorce does not result in long-term damage, it is "usually brutally painful To the boys and girls in my research divorce seemed cataclysmic and inexplicable. How could a child feel safe in a world where adults had suddenly become untrustworthy?"

One of Hetherington's success stories is a woman named Bethany. As an adult, she is doing extremely well, thanks to her mother's heroic parenting. I certainly do not blame her mother for choosing divorce -- her husband's repeated infidelities were one proximate cause. And yet this is what divorce meant for Bethany: "The previously placid Bethany also would fly into rages, hitting and biting her mother, whom she blamed for the separation. In her distress, she began to wet the bed again, had night terrors, and would wake crying or crawl into bed with [her mother] three or four times a night. Bethany later said, 'I had to keep checking to see if Mom was there. If Dad could leave, why couldn't she?'"

The larger questions raised by these emotional realities of divorce are not, ultimately, scholarly ones. How and when can it be right for mothers and fathers to cause brutal pain to their children? If the human spirit is indeed resilient, can't enterprising adults perhaps find some other path to personal growth? How much are our ideas about the relative harmlessness of divorce undermining our ability to build the lasting love we crave?