The kids will be alright if the parents split up. Right? If the parents are happy, the children will be happy.
Well, those children are now speaking, and they are not happy. They’re talking about the damage their parents’ divorce caused.
These are people who, even if they’ve gone on to have functional lives, still carry the scars of divorce with them into their own marriages and relationships.
In Leila Miller’s book, Primal Loss, 70 now-adult children of divorce give their candid and often heart-wrenching answers to eight questions, including: What were the main effects of your parents’ divorce on your life? What do you say to those who claim that “children are resilient” and “children are happy when their parents are happy”? What would you like to tell your parents then and now? What do you want adults in our culture to know about divorce? What role has your faith played in your healing?
The responses are difficult to read yet not without hope. Most of the contributors—women and men, young and old, single and married—have never spoken of the pain and consequences of their parents’ divorce until now. Despite vastly different circumstances, the similarities in their testimonies are striking and fly in the face of conventional wisdom that children of divorce will eventually be fine.
As one Amazon reviewer writes, “The stories from these adults is like a bolt of lightning in an atmosphere of divorce and separation propaganda.”
Dear Men,
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