Divorce as a Children’s Rights Issue

Blast from the past! This was originally published in October of 2014. Dr J traveled to California’s Simi Valley to participate in the International Children’s Rights Institute’s conference hosted by Robert Lopez–this is our podcast of her talk there, “Divorce as a Children’s Rights Issue.”

Transcript:

(Please note transcripts are auto-generated and may contain errors)

Divorce as a Children’s Rights Issue

Thanks for joining us for Ruth Institute’s podcast. Our website is www.RuthInstitute.org. We seek to promote and strengthen traditional marriage. I encourage you to sign up for our free e-newsletter at the website, which has information on what we’re doing around the country and how you can be involved.

As Dr. Lopez said, I used to teach economics, and so I see all of you are taking classes in classics and English literature. So I know you’re all math phobic? Is that right? No. So I actually have some charts and graphs and numbers and stuff like that. Oh, you guys ready for that? And it will be on the final.

I’ve been waiting since 1996 to say that to somebody. Yes, as he mentioned, I’m Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse. I’m founder and president of the Ruth Institute. And our mission is to work on different aspects of the marriage issue. Dr. Lopez asked me to come and talk with you about the divorce issue and talk to you about how divorce affects children.

What I like to say to you at the very beginning here is that this 45 minute period could change your life. This is 45 minutes that could change your life if you will have an open mind and an open heart to what I’m about to say to you, because the impact of divorce on society has been wide ranging.

It has been far reaching and it has been largely invisible. And so I want to call to your attention the different ways in which the divorce issue has affected many people. My colleague Jennifer Johnson was going to talk with you, basically giving her personal testimony about the impact of divorce in her life. I hired Jennifer Johnson to work with us at the Ruth Institute as our finance director.

She keeps us solvent. You know, she’s the accountant. She’s a bookkeeper. But as she worked with me for a period of time, she came to feel that these issues were extremely important and extremely important to her personally. And the reason they were important to her personally is because she is a child of divorce. Her parents were married and then divorced when she was two years old. And when her parents divorced, her mother then remarried, and her father then remarried.

Her father remarried not once, but twice. And so the impact that this had on Jennifer’s life just over time became clear to her that this had had a bigger impact on her life than she had realized and than anybody around her was willing to say. Now let’s see if I can make this work now that we have lights and action here.

All right. Divorce is a children’s rights issue. Jennifer and me. Jennifer’s goals in this part of the presentation, she wanted me to share with you just how divorce disfigures the child’s bonds to their parents, how it misshapes the bonds themselves to show how family structure influences parental behavior towards children, and how sometimes, even in spite of ourselves, good people can end up doing things that are not really in the interests of their children.

They don’t, people don’t mean for these things to happen is the point. Okay. And finally, to talk about the idea of a structural injustice to children that exists separately from the good parenting skills or the bad parenting skills or anything like that that might be out there. In other words, the structure of the family can work against even the best people, making the best efforts for the good of their children.

There’s just too much of a burden for the individuals to bear. So Jennifer came up with this diagram and this concept of a diagram in order to illustrate the impact of family structure on a child’s life. This picture shows Jennifer’s mother over there on one side, Jennifer’s stepfather and Jennifer’s half sister, Laura. Okay. So Jennifer was born to this new union.

And what I want you to see about this structure, what Jennifer likes about this structure is that it shows Laura there connected to both of her parents, and it shows a kind of roof over the child’s head formed by the parents’ bond. That’s formed over as a kind of a protective bond over the child’s life. But now, if we look at Jennifer’s relationship to this new union, what is Jennifer’s relationship to it?

Well, Jennifer is outside that triangle. She’s outside that triangle because she’s not related to the father. She has a different father. Look at the eldest child is depicted outside the nuclear family structure. And look, please, if you will, at the inequality for children in this family, there’s an inequality between the child of the current union and the child of the previous union.

So we hear a lot about equality as something people value. But here’s a kind of structural inequality built right into the structure of a divorced and remarried, reconstituted family here. Then she points out that the reason she is outside that structure, the nuclear family, is because she has a different father. And if you look at the triangle on your far right side over there, there was a triangle of Jennifer’s mom and dad over Jennifer.

But because the bond between the mother and father is severed, that triangle no longer really exists for her. That structural feature no longer exists for her. So that’s why it’s different for her. Now she says, look, look over here. There is a place where the kids are equal, and that’s where you’ve got multiple divorced and remarriage. The children who have either half or step siblings, they’re equal to one another.

So in this particular case, Jennifer and her father are in an equal relationship to Jennifer’s first step mother and all of Jennifer’s step siblings. Now, let me just mention one little story about Jennifer and her step siblings, because this is a story she’s told in print. One reason I’m a little awkward telling her story is because it’s her story.

And I don’t want to disclose a confidence because I know a lot more about this story than would be appropriate to tell. But she has told this in print. So it’s okay. You know, you could find it online if you wanted to find it. But one of the things that happened in Jennifer’s life is that when her parents divorced and then they remarried, she, of course, as is customary, moved from one house to the other.

Now, I just want you to think about that for a minute. Let’s not take this point for granted. Let’s hover on this idea for a while, okay? That the mother and father separate and they live in separate houses. And it is a child who moves every week. What if the child stayed in the house and the adults moved every week?

Why is that funny? Why is that funny? It shouldn’t be funny, right? The adults created the situation. The adults should bear the cost. But in point of fact, no adult would willingly bear that situation. But we insist that the child, the most vulnerable party, without so much as a How do you do? We insist that they put up with that.

Well, anyhow, one time Jennifer went over to her father’s house. And this, by the way, if she were here, she would tell you this. The way she always felt is first I was at my mom’s house and then I was at my dad’s house. She never really felt like she had a house. She was at somebody else’s. So anyway, she goes over to her father’s house and she finds that her step siblings are gone, the mother is gone, the stepmother is gone because they’ve divorced, they’ve separated, they’ve ended the relationship.

And she didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to those siblings whom In the first instance she didn’t really want around very much. You know, they were kind of thrust on her when her dad remarried. And she wasn’t looking for new brothers and sisters, but she got them. And after a while she became attached to them.

They came to matter to her. She loved them. And all of a sudden, they’re gone. They’re gone. That’s the kind of disruption that we’re talking about inside this family. So here’s her entire family structure diagram, which has on it the multiple marriages and remarriages. And you can see it’s kind of complicated. Many of you could, if we have more time, we might ask you to draw your own family story diagrams, because some of you have some complicated stories, I’m sure.

In a room this size, a room this age, there are probably quite a few of you who would have a lot of little arms going off on your family story diagrams. But we want you to just start to think about this from the child’s point of view. Where is that protection for the child coming in, if not from the union, between their mothers and fathers?

What is it that happens when the mother and father’s union is dissolved or breaks down? What happens from the child’s point of view? One story Jennifer sometimes tells is that her stepdad went away on a trip and he came back and he brought jackets, nice new jackets that came from the place that he had visited. And he had one for his daughter and he had one for his wife and nothing for Jennifer.

Now, did he mean to leave her out? Probably not. He was just being thoughtless. Family pictures get taken. Alana was talking about the case of the family portrait over the cherished memory of the deceased father. Okay. It is an unusual family reunion to a step and blended and reconstituted families. For some people to be asked to not be in the picture.

You’re part of the family. You’re not part of the family. These kinds of things. It’s almost as if you get to a certain point in these relationships and reconstituting of the relationships where there is no just solution to the situation in which people find themselves. So this is part of what we have asked of children to deal with, as we have permitted adults to take down their marriages and reconstitute their marriages.

So, as I mentioned, you’re going to get a copy of this PowerPoint so you can study this if you want to. But Jennifer had a little fun with this and decided to put up some other people’s family structures. One family structure she put up is Alana’s family structure because Alana is a good friend of the Ruth Institute, and also she’s enough of a public figure that a lot of people know her situation.

But here’s Alana’s picture. You’ve got Alana’s mother, Alana’s stepdad, her second stepdad, actually, and Alana’s half brother. You see the half brother, Alana’s half brother, has two parents. He has a relationship with both of his parents. But there’s Alana over there by herself related only to her mom. And Jennifer drew in there a nice, big, bright red wedge in that picture between Alana and her father.

Alana didn’t mention this in her story, but she has said it in print. So I feel okay repeating that she went looking for her biological father. Ultimately found him, but he had already died by the time she found him. What I want to point out to you about that big, red, nasty, ugly looking wedge there is that it has been installed by the government.

I want you to understand, just to look back over our shoulders to the talks that we had earlier this morning, the way those surrogacy and third party reproduction markets work. They do not work like an ordinary market where I give you money, you give me the object. The thing you’re really buying is the undisputed right to be the parent of that child.

You see, if the state said we’re not going to enforce a surrogacy contract, that would be the end of the surrogacy industry. But if you had to take your chances that she was never going to change her mind, it just wouldn’t be happening. If the state said, Look, Mr. Sperm Donor, I don’t care where you produced your sperm or how you installed it into the lady, you are the father.

You owe child support. I don’t want to hear about it. You know, I don’t want to hear about how the sperm came about. I’m not interested in that. If the state said you are the father, this industry would go away completely. Right. So that wedge between Alana and her dad was put there by the law.

This is not a free market. Let’s let everybody do what they want kind of situation, because it relies on the institution, a legal institution created by the state to give adults what they want, regardless of the impact on the child. And that’s what I want to point out to you.

So Jennifer had a little fun here, went to the Bible and found the polygamous family structure of Jacob and his 12 sons. He has four wives. And look at what that structure does. It puts the man at the center of everything. Isn’t that wonderful? And as we know, if you know your Bible, you know that there were a lot of problems in this family that had to do with jealousies of the children of one mother versus the children of the other mothers, right?

Because Jacob had a favorite wife. Therefore, her children were his favorite children. And the other brothers didn’t like that too much. And so there were a lot of problems within that, inside that family created by that. So she just wanted to show you.

And then this is a character she found on the Internet. I don’t know who Jamie Cummings is exactly, but he’s had 17 children with 15 women. You know, he’s doing better than the Old Testament patriarchs there, in a sense, putting himself right there in the center of all of these women and children, with the exception that he’s not required, I suppose, to support these children the way they did in biblical times anyway.

So that’s roughly what Jennifer would have said if she were here. She would have said it with her own panache. And I’m really sorry that she wasn’t here to share this with you, But I’m now going to stop being the child of divorce and now be the analyst and talk with you like an economist. And please don’t hide under the table.

Now that I said we’re going to talk like economists or social science, okay? We’re going to talk like that a little bit and be a little bit more analytic and talk about the legal and social implications of divorce, of our divorce culture that we’ve created. And my real objective is I want to inspire you to become part of the Ruth Institute’s advocacy for the rights of children, for the rights of children of divorce.

So we’ll see if any of you feel so inspired. But I have a couple of topics. I’ve got three topics that I’m going to cover in the in this last half hour that I have with you. First, I’m going to talk with you about children’s interest in marriage. I want to argue to you, the children have a legitimate interest in marriage.

And then also, I want to talk with you about the state’s role in marriage and what the government’s duty might be to marriage. Second topic is I want to talk with you about the very wide-ranging impact of changing the legal culture to have no fault divorce. That has been that is not a small thing. It’s been a huge thing.

And I want to just kind of walk you through some of the different things that have been implicated by that. And then finally, I want to talk with you about what are we going to do about it? What can you do about it? What can I do about it? What should any decent person want to do about it and what can be done?

All right. So that’s what we’re going to do, our three big topics. So, first of all, the child’s interest and the government’s role. Now, this is the question, ladies and gentlemen, on this slide that I hope will burn in your hearts. I hope this is the question that will change your life. The question is very simple: What is owed to the child?

Do we owe the child anything? And I want to say that for many people in the modern world, the answer is that we don’t know much of anything. If they get born, we’ll take care of them. Of course we’ll take good care of them if we let them get born. But in the run up to their conception and birth, do we owe them any particular kind of stability or relationship or set up or anything like that?

Is there anything that we owe to children besides not physically abusing them? What do we owe to them? That’s what I want to ask you. So I want to say the children have a legitimate interest and entitlement to a relationship with both of their biological parents. You heard earlier today some of the impact of children being half orphans, of children not knowing who they are.

Okay. And I want to say that children have a legitimate entitlement, and interest in, knowing who they are, having a relationship with both of their parents, and being cared for by both of their parents. I call that identity rights. They have a right to know who they are. That’s what I mean by their identity right.  And because of that, they have an interest in the stability of their parents’ union.

Okay. So if you just think about the practicalities of how a child would have a relationship with two parents, typically the way it works is your relationship with one parent is mediated or controlled by your relationship with whatever parent you’re living with. Right. So if you live with your mom, whether or not you have a relationship with your dad is kind of under her control, whether she lets you see him, whether you go to visit him, how she talks about him when he’s not there, so on and so forth.

And many of you, I’m sure, know of situations where a child has had some kind of interruption with their relationship with one parent. They’re with one of their parents and the other parent, because of the relationship between the mother and father, the relationship between the child and one parent is compromised. You see what I mean?

And they may not mean to do it. They may not be trying to do that. They may be trying to do their best not to. What I want you to see is that the quality of the child’s relationship with the two of them depends heavily on the relationship between the two of them. So if they’re living on opposite sides of the country, the relationship between the one you’re far away from is going to be somewhat compromised just by the nature of the case.

All right. So the child has a legitimate interest in the stability of their parents’ union. But I think you would agree that a child can’t enforce that. A child can’t protect their own interests. A child can’t march into court and say, see here, I haven’t seen my father in six months. Someone get over here and do something about it.

Right. I mean, that’s not practical. Kids can’t do that. And what if we could, what if we said, Yeah, that’s right. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make it like a tort. Kids get to march in and say, by golly, do something for me. Okay, So now it’s grinding through the court trying to figure out why.

Where’s Dad? Why isn’t he here? And whose fault is it, and what are we going to do about it. Okay, so the child was six years old when that began. How old are they when it’s over? Maybe they’re seven. Maybe they’re eight. Maybe they’re ten. Who knows how old they are? But their developmental window for the jobs they had to get done as a six year old, that developmental window is closing.

They only get one year to be a six year old, one year to be a seven year old. Right. That’s part of how human development works. And so it’s not practical to say we’re going to somehow after the fact, correct these problems. What we need is an institutional structure that proactively protects the interests of children. And that, I would submit to you, is marriage, marriage between one man and one woman, presumably permanent.

And we’re going to talk about the permanent part today. That’s what we’re focused on here. Permanent marriage between the man and the woman so that the child can have their legitimate interests in relationship with both parents being addressed and met proactively, structurally, institutionally. Now, in this book, I have I available back there, Love and Economics.

And my first book, I spent really the first third of that book explaining how the child’s initial relationships with their parents formed the foundation for the child’s personality development. This is not nothing. This is not chump change. What goes on in the first 18 months of a child’s life is extremely important to them. And then the whole developmental process that unfold is extremely important.

And the relatedness that one has with parents is very important. And I think that Jennifer Johnson’s story of the disruption in her family that she endured multiple times during her childhood, that illustrates that this is correct, that this idea is correct, that the stability and quality of those relationships is extremely important to the personality’s development. So marriage is the structural institution that protects children’s rights proactively.

If you think it through, you can see it’s really the only one that does that. All the other things that we’ve been trying to do, all the alternative lifestyles, alternative family forms, all have some problem with respect to this objective. And you can mentally, you know, kind of go down the list and you would see what those were.

And so I realize, I want you to know that I fully realize, that my saying this, that children have this kind of entitlement. I realize that this places constraints on adult behavior. I fully grasp that. I myself was married and divorced by the time I was 24. I had no children at that time, so this didn’t kick in.

But it was very hard for me to say to myself that my attitude that I had, that it’s okay for me to do what I want and that I value the social structures that let me do what I want, that there was something wrong with that. It was hard for me to admit that, I have to tell you.

But I am now convinced that doing justice to children requires that we have this, that we as adults accept some constraints on our behavior. So the government’s duty to children, the legitimate and necessary government’s duty to children are, first of all, at a minimum, to create accurate records of people’s birth. The state has a duty to accurately record the facts of a person’s conception and birth.

That is to say, the genetic material, the genetic identity of who your parents were. The government should not be in the business of falsifying birth certificates in order to make adults comfortable for some reason. Okay. So that’s number one. Secondly, the government, the adoption ladies are going crazy over there, and this is good. Okay. The second point, which takes us way far afield from what else we have to talk about today in this context.

But just broadly speaking, the government should refrain from interfering with the functioning of the family. The government should not be interfering with the family’s day to day life. The government should not be taking over the functions of the family, like feeding children who, you know, I mean, if children need to be fed. I mean, I just I know this takes us far afield.

Bobby, don’t shoot me. But if you want to make sure poor children get fed, you could just give money to their parents so their parents can feed them. Or you could have a government sponsored program where all the children go into the school and they all sit there are cafeteria tables and they eat food that’s provided for them by the state.

I want to say that we ought to favor the former kind of way of giving food to children that preserves the bonds within the family. So sorry, I’m way off topic in a sense, but. But the government, I think, has a positive duty to not take over the functions of the family. Okay. But that’s really the only point I’m making here.

And then finally, finally, I’ve just mentioned this briefly. The government must make some kind of provision for exceptional situations where the mom and dad aren’t available, but they have to be humane provisions that do not somehow undermine the structure. Okay. So every social system is going to have some situations or some people that aren’t going to make it or the parents aren’t going to be available or there’s going to be some reason why divorce has to take place or whatever it is.

So you have to have some provision for exceptional situations, but they have to be provisions that don’t undermine the basic structure of what you’re trying to get done. And so I would argue that that’s another whole area of fruitful thought about how we might change things in our society. So let’s now talk about the wide ranging influence of no fault divorce.

So no fault divorce is one of those things that people think they understand, but they probably don’t understand. The first state to change the law to no fault was California in 1968 and what people thought they were going to do. And Ronald Reagan signed it into law and later said it was the worst thing he ever did, that the thing he regretted the most as governor of California.

But anyway, here’s what people thought they were doing when they changed this rule. The old rule said that you could only get divorced for cause. There was a presumption that marriage was permanent and you could get divorced for cause. And what would be a cause? What would be a marital fault? It could include adultery, abuse, abandonment, addiction.

Those would be the four A’s that in most states in some form or fashion. That’s what you would have to demonstrate that one of those things was true in order to be granted a divorce. And in order to do that, you had to provide some evidence. So if the two of us, let’s say, God forbid, Rob and I should want to get a divorce, I would have had to say, Well, honey, are we going to accuse you of being the adulterer?

And he would say okay. Well, all right. Yeah, I’ll take the hit. I’ll allow myself to be accused of adultery. She’d have to produce photos showing him going to a motel, so on and so forth to prove that he was adulterous so that you had a marital fault so that you could get a divorce. So people thought, Well, that’s crazy.

Why should we make people do that? They both want a divorce. Let them have a divorce. Why do they have to prove anything? Well, at that time, the divorce rate was about 6%. And what they thought they were doing was reducing the cost of divorce for those 6%. But in fact, what they were doing was changing the behavior of everybody.

Because if you noticed in my little discussion of me and Rob conspiring to hoodwink the judge into giving us a divorce, we were conspiring together. We both agreed to it. But in point of fact, most divorces today take place against the wishes of one of the parties. No fault divorce is a misnomer. The true name should be unilateral divorce.

Unilateral divorce is what we really have in this country. Probably between two thirds and three quarters of divorces take place against the wishes of one of the parties. And quite often it’s the person who is the faulting spouse, the person who is harming the marital bond. That’s the person who wants the divorce because he wants to run off and live with his new sweetie.

Right. And so the government takes sides with the person who wants the marriage the least. The government does not take sides with the blameless spouse against the spouse who’s committed a marital fault. The government takes sides with the person who wants the marriage the least. That’s our current situation. So, in point of fact, the government is not playing a neutral role in this whole process.

The government is intervening on the side of one of the parties. So naturally, as you might expect, this increased the divorce rate. But what you might not understand is that it also removed the presumption of permanence, and when you remove the presumption of permanence, that changes people’s behavior all around. Okay. So it used to be that when people get married at the age of 22 or something like that, they might get married right out of college.

And they’d say, okay, you want to go to medical school, I’ll work and put you through medical school, and then we’ll start a family and we’ll work together over that period of time. No one does that anymore. No one does that anymore. Because why? You put him through medical school. Bye bye. I’m going off with the nurse.

There’s nothing to stop him from doing that. So the mutual investment in the relationship can’t take place because a presumption of permanence is gone. Many of you young ladies are caught in this trap because you think correctly that you must finish all of your education, all of your professional degrees, get yourself established in a career, and then and only then, think about having your first baby.

Why? Because you do not have the presumption of permanence. And if he walks out on you, you need to be ready to take care of yourself. So, in effect, and this happened to me by the time I was in college, I was thinking like this already. Right. So this is a very long standing thing. In effect, we don’t get married until we’re ready to get divorced.

That’s what it amounts to. Until we’re ready to go out on our own and take care of ourselves. That’s what removing the presumption of permanence has meant. Then it also removed the presumption of sexual exclusive. Because adultery is no longer a marital fault. Right. So therefore, there’s no presumption of sexual exclusivity. And that sets up all kinds of other problems.

That’s probably one of the biggest drivers of the increased divorce rate is that everyone you know, people are married, but they’re really, really still kind of dating. You know, they’re really still kind of looking around at maybe there’s a better deal out there and there’s no penalty basically to them to do that. And the fact is that sexual jealousy is extremely powerful emotion, extremely powerful emotion.

And we’ve completely underestimated the impact of that. Cops will tell me, when I give talks on other topics, I’ll have policemen come up to me and shake my hand. You know, just, Oh, Dr. Morse, that was great. That was great. We deal with this all the time. And I’m like, What? What do you deal with all the time?

What are you even talking about? They’ll say, our domestic violence cases. We’re in their 24 seven dealing with domestic violence cases that are driven by sexual jealousy because people don’t think they need to be with one and only one partner. And then the guy’s jealous, the girl’s jealous, and so on and so forth. So there’s a lot that flows from removing the presumption of permanence.

In addition, there’s a tremendous assault on privacy that takes place through the family courts. I don’t want to go into this too much, but I just want to remind you, any of you who have ever experienced the family court, you’ll know that the family courts have jurisdiction over things that they do not have jurisdiction over in normal families.

So if your family is divorced and separated, the family court can be looking at all of your finances, telling you how much you have to spend on your child, how much you’re entitled to get for your children, they’ll look, they’ll be scrutinizing your investments. They’ll be looking at your child custody arrangements, who spends how much time with the child, so on and so forth.

And if parents can’t work things out, they end up in front of a divorce court. They end up in front of a judge. I’ve even heard, whenever I give this talk, somebody will come up to me and tell me some new thing that I hadn’t heard of before. One that somebody told me like this. It was like that, is a family court judge deciding what a girl’s prom dress was going to be because they couldn’t.

The husband and wife, the estranged husband and wife were arguing over whether the dress was too modest or not modest enough or whatever. And so an agent of the government is deciding your daughter’s prom dress. This is what divorce has done to us. All right. Now, I’ve got a whole bunch of slides here that I’m not going to go through.

On the impact of divorce on children. This is all my good social science stuff. You guys are going to love this. I’m going to send it to you. I’m going to skip over this one. This is behavior problems. Children of divorce, a behavior problem, Stepfather’s big problem, complete reference so you can look it up. No, I’m not making it up.

Now. I want to pause on this one. Deliberate self-harm. You guys know what deliberate self-harm is? That’s a euphemism for cutting. You guys know anybody who cuts? Okay, I knew somebody once who broke a CD and cut himself. Okay, so deliberate self-harm is over two times more likely in children in step or blended families. Okay, lot of anxiety in those families. This is one of the ways manifesting.

The boyfriend problem related to the stepfamily problem. The boyfriend problem. Child welfare workers will tell you that the boyfriend problem has to do with the cohabiting boyfriend who is not related to the child. Okay. The most dangerous person in a child’s life is the mother’s cohabiting boyfriend, and I have several studies here.

Domestic violence against women nine times more likely. But that’s not completely relevant to this. So I want to show you this chart. I couldn’t help it. You guys, you have to have a chart. Got an Econ prof in front of you. Here’s a chart. This chart shows you the rate of fatal injuries to children by their family type. This is from England and Wales and you see the very smallest one down there 2NPMD.

That stands for two natural parents married. The next largest one is the natural mother alone. And the one that’s really huge there the tallest one ever. That is the natural mother and a cohabitee. Okay. So the increased probability of being abused to the point of death, that’s what you’re looking at. Highly unlikely if mom and dad are living together and married to one another compared with mom and a cohabiting boyfriend more than even the other category.

The other category would include foster homes and group homes and stuff like that. So in this particular survey, you can see that mom having a new love interest is hazardous for the child. Okay. And so think about this. Think about what Jennifer went through with the jackets. That was a minor thing with the jackets, right? That was a little thing.

It was a minor thing. But what it showed was that he noticed which child was really his and which child wasn’t really his. The idea that we’re going to overwrite biology and that we’re all going to be so wonderful and so loving and we’re never going to notice again. That’s asking a lot. Some people do, some people do. Not every case is like this, of course, but the risk factor is quite substantial.

It means that a lot of people don’t and are not able to override it. Then the thing I want to point out about this particular study is I want you to look at the dates on it. 1968 to 1987 is when this particular set of data was collected.

And you might say, Well, Doctor Morse that’s old fashioned. Things are different now. No, things aren’t different now. Actually. You have more recent studies. We’d have similar kinds of results. The reason I want you to see this? People knew from the beginning that there were problems. People have known for a very long time that the divorced and reconstituted family had risks attached to it.

And we haven’t done anything about it. For a long time we’ve known this. And so that brings me to more data. This is from Sweden. This is about whether you have joint physical custody or not. I’m going to skip it over. What are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about it? What I want to point out with you is that the divorce culture has been in existence in the United States, at least for quite a while.

And in spite of lots and lots of data, you know, the data that I put up here, I could multiply it many times over. There’s a lot of data. There’s a lot of indication that there were problems for children, problems that would last a long time. By the way, we have something at the Ruth Institute called Kids Divorce Stories.org.

Kids Divorce stories Dot org. If any of you know anyone who is a child of divorce, I would recommend that you go there. It’s a place we modeled it off of Anonymous Us, actually. It’s a place where people can go and tell their stories of what it was like for them when their parents separated or what it was like for them growing up in that context and so on.

So people go there and tell their stories and you can see that some of these people are writing about things that happened 30 and 40 years ago. So we’ve known for some time that there were problems. We’ve known for some time that there were problems. And the point here is that the reason the divorce culture continues is because there are lies we are telling ourselves about it.

There are lies we are telling ourselves about it. And at the very top of the list is the idea: Kids are resilient. Kids are resilient. They’ll be okay. The kids will be fine as long as their parents are happy. That’s what we’ve been told. Now, by the way, under the old no fault divorce rules or pre no fault divorce rules, you could get a divorce for cause.

I want to just emphasize that because one of the lies we tell ourselves about this culture is that if you didn’t have, if you introduced fault back into divorce, that what would happen is that women would be trapped in abusive marriages. And so therefore, we have to have easy divorce, unilateral divorce, one person divorce, no evidence divorce. We have to have that otherwise domestic violence and women being trapped would be terrible.

But the fact is, that’s one of the myths. The fact is you could always get divorced for cause, but you had to prove something. And the state would take the side with the person who was blameless rather than ignoring any indication of fault. Okay, so there are many lies that our culture has been telling us. And some of these are up there.

Some of these are probably familiar to you. And if we started telling the truth about these things, we would be way, way ahead of the game. And so that is the Ruth Institute strategy for what we are going to do about it. With your help, hopefully with your help, we want to tell your story. If this is your story, we want to hear it.

We will listen. You know what? Sometimes it’s hard for people to tell the truth about what goes on in the family, even inside the family. Right. And Alana and Jennifer, we’re giving you kind of examples of that. You might hurt your mom’s feelings. You might hurt your dad’s feelings. There are a lot of very tender emotions around this, maybe a guilty conscience in the background, maybe some broken hearts in the background.

Very hard to talk about these things, even inside the family. And when the culture also has a blackout on negative information about divorce, then the burden becomes all the greater for the child who suffered. And so what I want to show you, if you take this brochure and you open it up, the front of it says, are you a survivor of the sexual revolution?

And if you open it up and you read down this column, what you will see is a whole list of different people who have been in some ways victimized by the sexual revolution. I’m not going to talk about all of them today. Obviously, I could do a whole talk on each and every one of them. Today we’re just talking about number one, children of divorce.

And you go over here, you’ll see some of the lies that people are told about their experience and why it’s okay and what it was really about, and so on and so forth. So I want you to have this brochure. I want you to think about what’s in here, and I want to invite all of you to be part of our mission, to tell your story, to speak out, because that’s what’s going to change the cultural momentum of silence around so, so many of these issues that people have to be silenced.

So I’m going to just close with a word from somebody that I don’t know if this is going to be considered appropriate or completely out of control, but I’m just going to mention this one guy called Jesus. In his day, men had the right to unilaterally divorce their wives. And we see this in Matthew 19. Somebody asked him, is it okay to divorce your wife?

And Jesus basically said, no, it is not okay. One to a customer for life is approximately what he said. Well, actually, that’s a slight paraphrase. Catholics don’t do Bible quotes. Actually, what he said literally was I say to you, whoever divorces his wife except for unchastity and marries another, commits adultery. What’s he prohibiting here? He’s prohibiting remarriage. If you’re in a dangerous marriage, even under the most stringent interpretation of the Christian ethos, you can get divorced if you’re in a dangerous marriage.

You can separate. The prohibition is on remarriage. And what we’ve seen through the data, what we’ve seen through Jennifer’s story, is that very often it’s the remarriage that is so problematic for children. That’s the thing that makes them feel like a leftover. That’s the thing that puts them at risk for their mom’s new boyfriend or their dad’s new wife.

That’s the thing. And so I just would like to leave by giving credit where it’s due. Thanks very much.

We’ve just been listening to Dr. J speaking on divorce rights as a children’s issue at the International Children’s Rights Institute’s conference in Simi Valley, California. Our website is www.ruthInstitute.org. And we’re also on Facebook. Like the Ruth Institute or Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse pages for updates. Our podcasts can be found online at Ruth Institute.libsyn.com and iTunes.

And as always, they’re under a Creative Commons license. If you’ve enjoyed them, please share them with friends. The Ruth Institute is a nonprofit, educational organization devoted to bringing hope and encouragement for lifelong married love.

About the Ruth Institute

The Ruth Institute is a global non-profit organization, leading an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.

Jennifer Roback Morse has a Ph.D. in economics and has taught at Yale and George Mason University. She is the author of The Sexual State and Love and Economics – It Takes a Family to Raise a Village.

To schedule an interview with Dr. Morse, contact media@ruthinstitute.org.

---