Study after study has been produced showing the negative effects of divorce on children. But even when the children of divorce manage to keep up their school grades and so on, divorce can still affect them in ways that are not directly measurable. I came across a very relevant quote on this point the other day from the philosopher Allan Bloom.

Bloom’s most famous book was The Closing of the American Mind. He was probably a conservative liberal. On the whole, he seemed to approve of liberalism, but he also was acutely aware that the abandonment of older traditions and ways of thinking involved a loss.

He knew that the overthrow of those older traditions in the name of individual freedom often caused harm. He believed that the quest for personal fulfilment had sparked a sort of war of all against all in which everyone was invited to chase their happiness at the expense of the happiness of others if need be. The high rate of divorce in Western societies was, he believed, a very good example of the war of all against all in action.

Bloom, a university lecturer, encountered the children of divorce every single working day and in this passage from The Closing of the American Mind he reflects on the effect divorce has had on many of his students and the way they see the world:

“A young person’s qualified or conditional attachment to divorced parents merely reciprocates what he necessarily sees as their conditional attachment to him, and is entirely different from the classic problem of loyalty to families, or other institutions, which were clearly dedicated to their members. In the past, such breaking away was sometimes necessary but always morally problematic. Today it is normal, and this is another reason why the classic literature is alien to so many of our young, for it is largely concerned with liberation from real claims-like family, faith, or country-whereas now the movement is in the opposite direction, a search for claims on oneself that have some validity. Children who have gone to the school of conditional relationships should be expected to view the world in the light of what they learned there.

“To children, the voluntary separation of parents seems worse than their death precisely because it is voluntary. The capriciousness of wills, their lack of directedness to the common good, the fact that they could be otherwise but are not- these are the real source of the war of all against all. Children learn a fear of enslavement to the wills of others, along with a need to dominate those wills, in the context of the family, the one place where they are supposed to learn the opposite. Of course, many families are unhappy. But that is irrelevant. The important lesson that the family taught was the existence of the only unbreakable bond, for better or for worse, between human beings.

“An additional factor in the state of these students’ souls is the fact that they have undergone therapy. They have been told how to feel and what to think about themselves by psychologists who are paid by their parents to make everything work out as painlessly as possible for the parents, as part of no-fault divorce. If ever there was a conflict of interest, this is it. There are big bucks for therapists in divorce, since the divorcees are eager to get back to persecuting the wretches who smoke or to ending the arms race or to saving ‘civilization as we know it.’ Meanwhile, psychologists provide much of the ideology justifying divorce-e.g., that it is worse for kids to stay in stressful homes (thus motivating the potential escapees-that is, the parents-to make it as unpleasant as possible there). Psychologists are the sworn enemies of guilt. And they have an artificial language for the artificial feelings with which they equip children. But it unfortunately does not permit such children to get a firm grip on anything.

The same blog in which I found this quote also carries a passage from a 19th century American theologian, Timothy Dwight, who is very gloomy about the prospects of divorced parents being able to impart religion to their children.

He said: “During the contentions of parents, which will usually be generated by the mere attainableness of divorce, and which become ultimately the occasion of granting it, the children will either be forgotten, or forced to take sides with the parents. . . . Jarring parents… can never teach their children religion, either by precept or example. Amid their own irreligious contentions, the farce would be too gross for impudence itself to act, and too ridiculous to be received seriously even by children. They would be left to grow up Atheists or Nihilists, without religion, without God, without hope.”

This strikes me as a little too despairing but there is probably some truth in it all the same.

In any case, here is the blog where I found these passages.