The first time I read Barbara Dafoe Whitehead’s article, “Dan Quayle Was Right,” published in 1993 in the Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1993/04/dan-quayle-was-right/307015/), I knew my husband and I weren’t too far off track. We had four kids and were still married.

Whitehead’s article surely ruffled a lot of feminist feathers.  As distasteful as it was for some to read, she did her homework. “Divorce and out-of-wedlock childbirth are transforming the lives of American children,” she wrote.

As a couple, we watched friend’s marriages dissolve into uncomfortable messes.  Staying married for them wasn’t
worth it anymore.

“If current trends continue,” Whitehead states,  “less than half of all children born today will live continuously with their own mother and father throughout child hood. ”

“So what?” you ask. “Lots of couples divorce. You don’t need a husband.”

Maybe you don’t need a husband, but every kid needs a dad. In fact, a  mom and a dad – under the same roof.

Need convincing? Whitehead provides the following evidence. I’ve taken it apart so you can take a good look:

• Children in single-parent families are six times as likely to be poor and stay poor longer.
• Twenty-two percent of children in one-parent families will experience poverty during childhood for seven years or more, as compared with only two percent of children in two parent families.
• Children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems.
• They are also more likely to drop out of high school
• To get pregnant as teenagers
• To abuse drugs
• And to be in trouble with the law.
• Furthermore, Whitehead says, “Compared with children in intact families, children from disrupted families are at a much higher risk for physical or sexual abuse.”

I didn’t realize how lucky I was until the day we took our kids on a drive  to visit my friend Ann and her family east of Santa Fe.

When everyone else had gone outdoors, Ann and I sat alone in the long room that served for eating and cooking and looked out over a riot of green that curved upward from fertile bottom-land toward the mesa.  “You’re lucky,” she said. “I’ve never had a man say he would support me.”

I felt blessed. I’d never had to leave my babies with anyone.

I assumed my husband would always take care of us. And he did.  Not that we were rich by any stretch of the imagination.

When we first married, we had no plan. I never asked him about his views on women working outside the home.  We simply knew that children need love and attention.

I took my role seriously, researching the best approaches for everything from curing the common cold to teaching reading.  I wanted to be good at it. He wanted to provide for his family.

I guess we were too naïve to know that couples get divorced for ridiculous – and often quite selfish –  reasons.

Maybe we made it work because we couldn’t imagine the alternative for our four children. When I hear how complicated people’s lives become after a divorce, I’m glad we never tried it. Children’s lives are never the same: it’s one weekend here, one weekend there. Mom has them on Christmas Eve. Dad gets them on Christmas Day. Backpacks left in the non-custodial parents’ car, no homework to turn in on Monday morning. That terrible feeling kids get in the pit of their stomach when they meet dad’s new girlfriend or mom’s new boyfriend.

I have a friend who’s been divorced less than a year. Her husband of twenty years remarried right away and immediately “forgot” that his  kids need food and clothing.  Now my friend  spends her time visiting the child support enforcement office and looking online for a new lawyer.  Never mind that he’s four months behind paying the mortgage on the house the divorce decree says she can live in for the next five years. Now she’s wondering how long it will be before she and the kids are on the street.

I can’t even begin to wrap my head around some of the relationship fiascoes: The newly divorced woman goes out and finds a boyfriend with three kids by two different exes, one of whom he never married. On his visitation days, he takes them all to his mother’s house so he can go out with his new girlfriend. No one pays attention to the kids.

I wonder how people’s lives get to be such train wrecks.

When couples with kids divorce, I think they’re creating adults who won’t be able to live without stress. They’ll have to create it in their lives in order to be comfortable, as though scratching an itch. That itch soon seems natural, like it belongs there permanently. And before long, there’s another generation of failed relationships.

I’m not proposing that people stay in relationships with drug and alcohol addicted spouses. Or abusive spouses. I’m proposing that before couples get divorced, they need to think about what’s going to happen in their kids’ lives that may put them at risk for emotional, behavioral, and cognitive  problems. At risk for all the things Whitehead says are likely to happen.

Even when home-life seems grim for that unhappy  husband or wife, the alternative is whole lot grimmer for children: it’s a broken heart.  I vote for getting help and fixing things. It’s the adult thing to do. FFG