What, then, can we take from Wallerstein's study? It is an insightful, long-term investigation of the lives of children from troubled divorced families. It gives us valuable information on what happens to children when things go wrong before and after a divorce. And things sometimes do go wrong: Many divorcing parents face the kinds of difficulties that Wallerstein saw in her families. Her basic point that divorce can have effects that last into adulthood, or even peak in adulthood, is valid. She was one of the first people to write about children who seemed fine in the short-term but experienced emotional difficulties in adolescence or young adulthood--in her previous book she called this the "sleeper effect"--and now she is the first to describe it in detail among adults who have reached their 30s. Psychotherapists, social workers, teachers and other professionals who see troubled children of divorce and their parents will find her analyses instructive. Parents and children who are struggling with divorce-related problems will find her analyses helpful.

But no one should believe that the negative effects of divorce are as widespread as Wallerstein claims. Some portion of what she labels as the effects of divorce on children probably wasn't connected to the divorce. And the typical family that experiences divorce won't have as tough a time as Wallerstein's families did. Parents with better mental health than this heavily impaired sample can more easily avoid the worst of the anger, anxiety and depression that comes with divorce. They are better able to maintain the daily routines of their children's home and school lives. Their children can more easily avoid the extremes of anxiety and self-doubt that plague Wallerstein's children when they reach adulthood.

What divorce does to children is to raise the risk of serious long-term problems, such as severe anxiety or depression, having a child as a teenager or failing to graduate from high school. But the risk is still low enough that most children in divorced families don't have these problems. In the British study, we found that although divorce raised the risk of emotional problems in young adulthood by 31 percent, the vast majority of children from divorced families did not show evidence of serious emotional problems as young adults.

Except for Wallerstein, many of the writers most concerned about divorce now appear to recognize this distinction. Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, who wrote the "Dan Quayle Was Right" piece in The Atlantic (drawing heavily on Wallerstein's earlier work), acknowledged in a more recent, book-length treatment, The Divorce Culture, that a majority of children probably aren't seriously harmed in the long term. But she argued that even if only a minority of children are harmed, divorce is so common that a "minority" is still a lot. And she is correct. Divorce is not a problem that "dramatically weakens and undermines our society," but it nevertheless deserves our attention.

For that reason, some of the remedies Wallerstein suggests would be useful: creating more support groups in schools for children whose parents are divorcing, insuring that divorced fathers contribute to the cost of their children's college education and educating newly separated parents about how to shield their children from conflict. Measures such as these would help some children without imposing undue strain on parents, schools or the courts.

Less clearly useful is Wallerstein's recommendation that parents in unhappy, loveless, but low-conflict marriages consider staying together for the sake of their children. I think she is probably right that children can develop adequately in "good enough" marriages that limp along without an inner life of love and companionship. There were millions of these marriages during the baby-boom years of the 1950s, when wives weren't supposed to work and women were forced to choose between having a career and being a mother. The result was often frustration and depression. Few people (not even Wallerstein) want to constrain women's choices again. Certainly, unhappy parents have an obligation to try hard to change an unsuccessful marriage before scuttling it. Without doubt some parents resort to divorce too hastily. But no one as yet has a formula that can tell parents how much pain they must bear, how much conflict to endure, before ending a marriage becomes the better alternative for themselves and their children.

Least defensible is the attempt by Wallerstein to inform readers whose parents have divorced that their problems with intimacy stem from the breakup. In high self-help style, Wallerstein tells her readers:

You were a little child when your parents broke up, and it frightened you badly, more than you have ever acknowledged.... When one parent left, you felt like there was nothing you could ever rely on. And you said to yourself that you would never open yourself to the same kinds of risks. You would stay away from loving. Or you only get involved with people you don't care about so you won't get hurt. Either way, you don't love and you don't commit.

And so forth. Wallerstein plants the seed of the pernicious effect of exposure to divorce as a young child--and then waters it. Yes, the reader thinks, that must be why I'm so anxious about getting married. Never mind that making a commitment to marry someone is anxiety-producing for young adults from any background. Or that we live in an era when the average person waits four to five years longer to marry than was the case a half-century ago. Wallerstein encourages readers to believe that most of their commitment problems stem from their parents' divorces. But parental divorce isn't that powerful, and its effects aren't that pervasive. To be sure, it raises the chances that children will run into problems in adulthood, but most of them don't. Unfortunately, that's a cover line that doesn't sell many magazines.

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