MURPHY BROWN REDUX
POPENOE, DAVID
MURPHY BROWN, REDUX by David Popenoe IN 1992, AFTER DAN QUAYLE GAVE HIS “Murphy Brown” speech, the cultural elite went apoplectic. Quayle had maintained that there was evidence to show that single...
...The other was that any negative effects there are on children flow from marital conflict, not the subsequent divorce...
...From this group all persons were selected who, at age 7, were living with both parents and for whom there is subsequent information about their parents’ marital status...
...And in 1995, they interviewed 430 offspring who had been living with these couples in 1980...
...In part, of course, it is a convenient, guilt-retarding rationalization for parents who are breaking up...
...Like the British study, this one uncovered substantial, long-term, negative emotional consequences of divorce...
...The article prompted a deluge of mail, including a letter signed by a dozen family researchers claiming that Whitehead had grossly overplayed the social-science findings of harm to kids...
...One was that while divorce may cause short-term difficulties for children, these eventually are resolved, and children are left no worse off than before...
...There have been some equally startling, though unpublicized, recantations in the academic community...
...Most traced only the immediate effects of divorce, and only on the youngest children...
...David Popenoe, a professor at Rutgers University, is codirector of the National Marriage Project and author of Life Without Father...
...In the final version, cosigned by most of the participants, it is difficult to detect much disagreement with Whitehead...
...she merely chose finally to speak out, presumably in conjunction with the termination of her TV series...
...It also provided verification for one of the old assumptions, finding that if pre-divorce marital conflict was very high, divorce was best for the longterm mental health of the offspring...
...What keeps parents happy should keep children happy too...
...Many of the couples had subsequently divorced...
...It is also, however, a judgment that at one time had some empirical support...
...During that time, through many drafts and as new findings about the effects of divorce became known, much of the steam behind the protest dissipated...
...The second longitudinal study is an American one reported by sociologists Paul R. Amato, a signer of the Atlantic letter, and Alan Booth in A Generation at Risk, published by Harvard University Press in 1997...
...These are merely the latest examples in a steady flow of research pointing to the same general conclusion: Divorce and single-parenthood put our children at risk, and we would be well advised to reduce the divorce rate and limit the number of single-parent families...
...Among family researchers, however, there seems to have been a real change of opinion...
...And besides, Murphy Brown is just a fictional TV character...
...The body of his speech was “completely sound,” she told the Los Angeles Times, and, speaking of Murphy Brown’s out-of-wedlock childbearing experience, she added, “I didn’t think it was a good message to be sending out...
...Candice Bergen didn’t change her mind...
...Today, longitudinal studies using more objective measures of the effects of divorce have been completed by leading family researchers, and they have slowly modified the old hopeful picture of divorce...
...And, in a surprising finding, fewer than one-third of the marriages ending in divorce were determined to have been high-conflict, while nearly 70 percent were deemed low-conflict...
...The authors conclude with a statement that is remarkable coming from the family-research community: “Future generations would be well served if parents remained together until the children are grown...
...With all due respect to the social sciences, how much more empirical research do we need to convince us of that...
...An early indication of this change came when many of the scholars who had signed the letter of protest to the Atlantic got together with other divorce researchers in 1994 in Middleburg, Va., to try to develop what amounted to a counter-statement to the Whitehead article...
...How can so mistaken an assumption have become so pervasive...
...Also, rather than measuring children’s conditions objectively, some studies relied on parents’ characterizations of the effects of the divorce—even though, as interested parties with powerful motives of self-justification and self-fulfillment, they could not be expected to be accurate informants about their own children...
...Quayle had maintained that there was evidence to show that single motherhood harms children...
...In fact, divorce may actually make things better...
...Then in April 1993, in a cover story in the Atlantic entitled “Dan Quayle Was Right,” Barbara Dafoe Whitehead summarized the data suggesting that not only out-of-wedlock parenthood but also divorce has negative effects on children, and academic researchers on the family became incensed...
...Two conclusions were widely trumpeted...
...These studies examine people’s lives from childhood to adulthood...
...These 11,759 subjects were interviewed when they reached age 33...
...The Atlantic’s pr?cis of Whitehead’s article began, “After decades of public dispute about so-called family diversity, the evidence from social science research is coming in: The dissolution of two-parent families, though it may benefit the adults involved, is harmful to many children, and dramatically undermines our society...
...Moreover, the negative effects for the children continued even after they left home, married, and entered the labor force...
...The original outcries from both the cultural elite and academic researchers were strongly flavored by an assertion much heard at the onset of the divorce revolution and still, unfortunately, widely believed— that if breaking up (or in Murphy Brown’s case, not marrying) is good for parents, it cannot be all that bad for children...
...The study found that for these children, a substantial amount of emotional turmoil stemmed from the divorce and the chain of circumstances it created, not merely from parental conflict during the marriage...
...The researchers interviewed a national random sample of 2,033 married individuals in 1980 and at regular intervals thereafter...
...Three years would pass before the results were finally published, in the October 1997 issue of Family and Conciliation Courts Review...
...How times have changed...
...But who was Quayle—or anyone else, for that matter—to say that single moms can’t do the job...
...In a stunning admission recently noted in these pages, Murphy’s Candice Bergen has told newspaper and TV interviewers that, in her opinion, Dan Quayle picked “the right theme to hammer home...
...One conclusion: Overall, most children of divorce experience dramatic declines in their economic circumstances, abandonment (or the fear of abandonment) by one or both of their parents, the diminished capacity of both parents to attend meaningfully and constructively to their children’s needs, . . . and diminished contact with many familiar or potential sources of psychosocial support . . . as well as familiar living settings...
...The last thing they need is to be stigmatized...
...But the early studies of divorce and single-parent families did not follow their subjects over time...
...The results were reported in the April 1998 American Sociological Review, in an article whose authors include two signers of the letter to the Atlantic, Andrew J. Cherlin and P. Lindsay Chase- Lansdale...
...Back in the 1970s, some preliminary findings about the social consequences of divorce and resultant single-parenthood were remarkably encouraging...
...The first is a British study drawing on a larger investigation that has been following all children born in Britain in the first week of March 1958...
...Now, two major new pieces of divorce research have been published, and they further erode the old claims that there were no long-term effects on children and that most damage was done by marital conflict before the divorce...
...Where marital conflict was not so high, however, divorce made things considerably worse...
...As a consequence, the experience of divorce is a psychosocial stressor and a significant life transition for most children, with long-term repercussions for many...
Vol. 3 • July 1998 • No. 44
