When my kids stay with me as part of their weekly custody arrangement, we usually spend Saturday mornings eating my wife’s homemade pancakes and watching a movie I taped from either the High School Musical channel or the Sponge Bob channel. My nine-year-old son handles DVR remote control duties with the fluid dexterity of Liberace on the piano.At some point during recent showings of The Shaggy Dog and The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl, I picked up on two common themes:
1) The willingness of Sex and the City‘s Kristin Davis to play a suburban housewife under any circumstances, and
2) The leveraging a child’s worst nightmare – divorce — for gratuitous dramatic effect.
In both kid films, the parents’ marriage is in some state of jeopardy; in one, the kids perceive a role in saving it. In each case, the parents avert tragedy and ultimately fall lovingly into each other’s arms. (Though Davis should consider parting with her agent).
Said a friend of mine recently, “I remember as a kid of divorce, being deeply offended by “The Parent Trap” for its premise that a marriage could be fixed just by sticking the parents in a room together!
Even in the far superior The Incredibles, Violet warns her brother Dashiell: “Mom and Dad’s life could be in danger. Or worse, their marriage!”
What’s the takeaway for spongy young minds other than defining divorce as a fate worse then death?
I’m all for positive nuclear family images in kid films, even the “hit-you-over-the head-with-a-mallet” kind (see: Spy Kids). What makes me uncomfortable is when divorce is superfluously depicted to kids as the end of the world. The obvious inference to real-life children of divorce (of which there are roughly one million a year):
Your family is broken. Happy ending for us; stinks to be you.
In reality, while divorce is an unfortunate outcome, these children are not necessarily wounded for life. A comprehensive 2002 studyof more than 1,400 families and 2,500 children by a professor emeritus in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia found the negative impact of divorce on both children and parents has been “exaggerated”: Roughly 20-25% of youngsters experience long-term damage after their parents break up, but the large majority end up coping comfortably.
The difference between coping with upheaval and being deeply scarred by it seems to hinge more on good parenting — as well as what was going on before the divorce — than on family definition. Divorce is clearly not the psychological terminal sentence for kids it’s sometimes made out to be.
Knowing this, Hollywood writers looking to put their kid protagonists in jeopardy should stick to the safe slate of villains and demons, and avoid the all too easy road of demonizing divorce.ÂÂ
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Joel Schwartzberg is an award-winning essayist from New Jersey whose first book “The 40-Year-Old Version: Humoirs of a Divorced Dad” is now available.
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Thanks for the post Joel, but I wanted to give some direction on the effects of divorce on kids. I agree divorce should not be demonized (nothing should be for that matter), but I also feel that divorce is often downplayed and the negative effects are ignored by couples who really have no business getting divorced.
I’ve been in the professional field of helping marriage for 15 years, and I’ve seen first hand the hurt and devastation divorce causes the family. I added a post to my site that has some great PDF downloads on legitimate and helpful research on divorce and its effects on the family.
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Thanks for the post Joel, but I wanted to give some direction on the effects of divorce on kids. I agree divorce should not be demonized (nothing should be for that matter), but I also feel that divorce is often downplayed and the negative effects are ignored by couples who really have no business getting divorced.
I’ve been in the professional field of helping marriage for 15 years, and I’ve seen first hand the hurt and devastation divorce causes the family. I added a post to my site that has some great PDF downloads on legitimate and helpful research on divorce and its effects on the family.
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What I would like to see *someone* research or question is the long-term effect of kids seeing parents model bad behavior in a marriage, including arguing, disrespect, put-downs, no affection, and on and on. Because a divorce is a traumatic event, it’s easy to focus on it and its impact. Not so easy to measure the slow drip, drip, drip of ongoing damage over months or years when two people stay together for whatever reason (when they shouldn’t be together).
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What I would like to see *someone* research or question is the long-term effect of kids seeing parents model bad behavior in a marriage, including arguing, disrespect, put-downs, no affection, and on and on. Because a divorce is a traumatic event, it’s easy to focus on it and its impact. Not so easy to measure the slow drip, drip, drip of ongoing damage over months or years when two people stay together for whatever reason (when they shouldn’t be together).
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First, thanks for this post!
@Michael, sorry but I’ve got to go with @Sam on this one. I am a bit confused by the statement ‘no business getting divorced’. Yes, marriage is very hard work, but nor is it a life sentence. (Ouch, that was a radical statement.) We used to all be dead by 40! And most men had 2 or 3 wives, because women kept dying in childbirth. Now, if we marry at 25, we could be with the same person for 60 years. That’s a very long time for life not to change things up, such that the marriage between those individual is no longer a healthy option.
@Sam – bingo! IF the parents handle the divorce maturely, and do NOT use the children as weapons, divorce is a much healthier option, showing that people can be healthy and happy, and probably move onto even better relationships.
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First, thanks for this post!
@Michael, sorry but I’ve got to go with @Sam on this one. I am a bit confused by the statement ‘no business getting divorced’. Yes, marriage is very hard work, but nor is it a life sentence. (Ouch, that was a radical statement.) We used to all be dead by 40! And most men had 2 or 3 wives, because women kept dying in childbirth. Now, if we marry at 25, we could be with the same person for 60 years. That’s a very long time for life not to change things up, such that the marriage between those individual is no longer a healthy option.
@Sam – bingo! IF the parents handle the divorce maturely, and do NOT use the children as weapons, divorce is a much healthier option, showing that people can be healthy and happy, and probably move onto even better relationships.
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@Joel – I have no problem with divorce being demonized. As a child of divorce, my life remains to be impacted by my parents decision. My parents’ divorce even effects my own children today. This is not to say that people who get a divorce are bad people or bad parents. But if someone takes marriage or divorce more seriously because of a childhood memory, all the better.
@Urban Panther, you clearly have no respect for marriage, so it’s difficult to take your comment seriously. Marriage is, in fact, a life sentence; that’s the point. While I agree that lifestyles & lifespans have changed over time, you shouldn’t get married if you expect to “change things up” one day.
@Sam – you’re correct. Many couples are worse together than they are apart, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that divorce is the silver bullet. Bad parents will screw up a kid whether they’re married or divorced. Divorce will always have a negative and traumatic effect on children – even if the parents are wonderful.
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@Joel – I have no problem with divorce being demonized. As a child of divorce, my life remains to be impacted by my parents decision. My parents’ divorce even effects my own children today. This is not to say that people who get a divorce are bad people or bad parents. But if someone takes marriage or divorce more seriously because of a childhood memory, all the better.
@Urban Panther, you clearly have no respect for marriage, so it’s difficult to take your comment seriously. Marriage is, in fact, a life sentence; that’s the point. While I agree that lifestyles & lifespans have changed over time, you shouldn’t get married if you expect to “change things up” one day.
@Sam – you’re correct. Many couples are worse together than they are apart, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that divorce is the silver bullet. Bad parents will screw up a kid whether they’re married or divorced. Divorce will always have a negative and traumatic effect on children – even if the parents are wonderful.
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@Scott – your perception of me is fair enough from the brief paragraph I have written. The downside of blog comments, I’m afraid. However, all 3 of my children are adults and gladly tell anyone that they are much happier people for their parents’ divorce. Their dad and I have both found the ‘right’ people for us, and are now able to model what Sam was talking about, which is how extremely healthy relationships work. And yes, their dad is remarried, and I am soon to be. I have the utmost respect for marriage, as long as the couple are fullfilled as people. If you try to work it out, as most people do actually, before making the very serious decision to divorce, and it just isn’t going to work, then that’s what I mean about marriage not being a ‘do or die’ situation. Far better and healthier for everyone concerned to divorce.
And sorry if my comment came across that I would enter into a marriage expecting to ‘change it up’. Absolutely not. I was saying that are a myriad of reasons that people find out, somewhere along their life’s journey, that they are making the other person chronically sad and themselves chronically sad. That’s the time to look at other options.
I realize this is a very volatile subject based on each individual’s life experiences, and it invokes very strong reactions. I actually almost didn’t comment because of that, but my experience and my children’s experience supported the post, so I threw in my two cents worth.
I am also very conscious of not hijacking a post, so I’ll leave it at that 🙂
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@Scott – your perception of me is fair enough from the brief paragraph I have written. The downside of blog comments, I’m afraid. However, all 3 of my children are adults and gladly tell anyone that they are much happier people for their parents’ divorce. Their dad and I have both found the ‘right’ people for us, and are now able to model what Sam was talking about, which is how extremely healthy relationships work. And yes, their dad is remarried, and I am soon to be. I have the utmost respect for marriage, as long as the couple are fullfilled as people. If you try to work it out, as most people do actually, before making the very serious decision to divorce, and it just isn’t going to work, then that’s what I mean about marriage not being a ‘do or die’ situation. Far better and healthier for everyone concerned to divorce.
And sorry if my comment came across that I would enter into a marriage expecting to ‘change it up’. Absolutely not. I was saying that are a myriad of reasons that people find out, somewhere along their life’s journey, that they are making the other person chronically sad and themselves chronically sad. That’s the time to look at other options.
I realize this is a very volatile subject based on each individual’s life experiences, and it invokes very strong reactions. I actually almost didn’t comment because of that, but my experience and my children’s experience supported the post, so I threw in my two cents worth.
I am also very conscious of not hijacking a post, so I’ll leave it at that 🙂
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My suggestion? Stick to Disney animated films. In most cases, one of the parents is dead or dies in the course of the film, or is simply not around. No messy divorce needed. It still puzzles me though: Who would have a kid with Goofy?
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My suggestion? Stick to Disney animated films. In most cases, one of the parents is dead or dies in the course of the film, or is simply not around. No messy divorce needed. It still puzzles me though: Who would have a kid with Goofy?