Mediate Michigan

An interesting article presenting different views from and about children of divorce can be found here.

One book, The Bright Side: Surviving Your Parents’ Divorce,  mentioned in the article is written by 22 year old Max Sindell.  The book contains a Divorced Kids Bill of Rights.  Mr. Sindell has also set up a website Survivingyourparentsdivorce.com.  The article notes: “He (Mr. Sindell) has a close relationship with both parents, he says, which he attributes partly to the divorce process. “You start to see your parents as people rather than as top-down authority figures,” he says. Even at 6, he could see they were unhappy together. When they announced the split, “my initial reaction was one of relief.”

“There’s no question that having parents fight, split up and moving can be stressful and damaging,” he allows. “But if you keep talking about that, it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy. I really want to change the narrative. Whether or not you think that divorce is good or bad, people are going to get divorced, and kids are going to be dealing with it. I try to be helpful.”

Alternatively, the article also quotes Elizabeth Marquardt, a 30-something child of divorce who wrote Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce in 2005, based on the first nationally representative U.S. study of grown children of divorce.  The article notes:  “An amicable divorce is better than a bitter one, she (Ms. Marquardt) acknowledges, but there is no such thing as a good divorce. “While some children can certainly rise to the occasion, they lose their childhoods, and I think that’s something that we should mourn, not celebrate,” she is quoted as saying in a recent interview. The director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values in New York and an outspoken Christian, Ms. Marquardt wants to give parents reasons to stay together.”