Divorce is a very tricky topic to write about it because those who have experienced divorce have experienced something very painful and feelings can be very raw. This was brought home to me again when I wrote a piece dealing with divorce for The Irish Independent last Friday.

The piece was prompted by the release of State papers from 1986, which was the year of the first divorce referendum. Some of the reactions to my column in the comments section were from people who had been divorced or whose parents had divorced. Both the parents and the children (now grown up) said they were better off out of an unhappy and fractured home. I have no doubt that is so.

At the same time, I have been contacted on occasion by people who were divorced against their will, and were very unhappy about that, and by young adults whose parents divorced, and these young adults were very sad their parents had split up, they felt hurt by it, and wished it had never happened.

A few years ago, we hosted a talk by Elizabeth Marquardt who had been through two divorces growing up and wrote a book called ‘Between Two Worlds’ based on interviews with children of divorce who spent their childhood having to divide their lives between their mother’s home and their father’s home and did not enjoy the experience at all.

Studies seem to indicate that child wellbeing following divorce is influenced by how high-conflict their parents’ marriage was prior to divorce.

A 2010 paper by leading marriage researcher, Paul Amato, called ‘Research on Divorce: Continuing Trends and New Developments’, summarises the research in this regard.

The paper says: “Research in the 1990s indicated that children tend to show relatively little change or even improvements in various forms of well-being if divorce ends a high-conflict marriage. In contrast, children tend to show declines in various forms of wellbeing if divorce ends a low-conflict marriage (Amato, 2000).  A few studies conducted during the last decade have replicated this finding (Booth & Amato, 2001; Strohschein, 2005).”

The effects of divorce on children and adults seems to be a taboo subject in this country. It is almost never discussed, probably because of the kind of anger such a discussion can generate. Also, such a discussion might challenge the comfortable idea that all marriages that end in divorce were high conflict and desperately unhappy and it is better for everyone, including the children, if those very unhappy couples go their separate ways.

But other research by Amato (‘A Comparison of High- and Low-Distress Marriages That End in Divorce’), indicates that about half of marriages that end in divorce are low-conflict. Those are the ones that can do lasting damage to children. Can we at least have a discussion about this?