Wallerstein

Psychoanalytic Psychology 2004, Vol. 21, No. 3, 353–370

Copyright 2004 by the Educational Publishing Foundation 0736-9735/04/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/0736-9735.21.3.353

THE UNEXPECTED LEGACY OF DIVORCE Report of a 25-Year Study
Judith S. Wallerstein, PhD
Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition and University of California, Berkeley

Julia M. Lewis, PhD
San Francisco StateUniversity

This follow-up study of 131 children, who were 3–18 years old when their parents divorced in the early 1970s, marks the culmination of 25 years of research. The use of extensive clinical interviews allowed for exploration in great depth of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as they negotiated childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood. At the 25-year follow-up, acomparison group of their peers from the same community was added. Described in rich clinical detail, the findings highlight the unexpected gulf between growing up in intact versus divorced families, and the difficulties children of divorce encounter in achieving love, sexual intimacy, and commitment to marriage and parenthood. These findings have significant implications for new clinical andeducational interventions.
The study we report here begins with the first no-fault divorce legislation in the nation and tracks a group of 131 California children whose parents divorced in the early 1970s. They were seen at regular intervals over the 25-year span that followed. When we first met our young participants, they were between ages 3 and 18; by the mid- to late 1990s, when our study ended, theywere 28–43 years old. They were the vanguard of an army of adults raised in divorced families who made up one quarter of the American population between the ages of 18 and 44, as reported in 1991 in the National Survey of Families and Households (personal communication, Norval Glenn, November 1991). Whereas it is well known that in the closing three decades of the last century the incidence ofdivorce hovered at nearly half of all first marriages, it is less known that half
Judith S. Wallerstein, PhD, Judith Wallerstein Center for the Family in Transition, Corte Madera, California, and School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley; Julia M. Lewis, PhD, Department of Psychology, San Francisco State University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed toJudith S. Wallerstein, PhD, 290 Beach Road, Belvedere, CA 94920. E-mail: judywall@mindspring.com

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of the one million children whose parents make up the annual divorce rate are age 6 or under at the breakup (personal communication, Norval Glenn, November 1991). Like our subjects, these children will spend the bulk of their growing-up years in postdivorcefamilies, often within a range of new relationships of one or both parents that include cohabitations and remarriages, and they will experience new losses due to their parents’ broken love affairs or second, and even third, divorces. This is the first and only such report that tells the story of growing up in the postdivorce family through the eyes of children. The divorced family is a new kind offamily and not a truncated version of the familiar intact family that has been studied within and across many disciplines. Relationships with stepparents, visiting parents, stepsiblings, and lifestyles that include joint custody have no counterpart in the intact family. Moreover, as we report, when the marital bond is severed, parent–child relationships are likely to change radically in ways that arenot predictable from their course during the marriage. Both childhood and parenthood are challenged and often heavily burdened within the divorced family, at the same time that many adults are set free from unhappy and sometimes tragic situations. If we recall what Erikson taught us about the close connection between childhood and society, then we are, as a society, in the midst of profound...