nfer, manipulate them and can't keep them for long. It is worrisome also, to wonder about the ultimate consequences of fatherhood's decline. Says Glendon: "Will a man who hasn't had a father know how to be a father?" (Glendon) And it is disturbing that the family life of so many otherwise privileged children is so thin and unnourishing a medium for the cultivation of sturdy souls. A National Center for Health Statistics study found that children from single parent homes were 100% to 200% more likely than children from two parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems and about 50% more likely to have learning disabilities. In the nation's hospitals, over 80% of adolescents admitted for psychiatric reasons come from single-parent families. (Smith)No scale can measure the deepest wounds of divorce for children and impressive recent research suggests they are wounds that never heal. Psychologist Judith Wallerstein, who for 15 years has intimately followed 130 children of divorce was shocked by the extent of the harm she found, not just right after the divorce but years later. Wallerstein had at first assumed that an unhappy marriage must be unhappy for children too. While they would feel pain at the divorce, they would also feel relief and would be just fine as time passed and their parents grew happier. This was found to be untrue, she was amazed at the intensity of the pain and fear that engulfed these kids when their parents split up. "The first reaction is one of pure terror," says Wallerstein. Though most were middle-class children of executives and professionals, they worried who was going to feed and care for them. Preschool children feared that now that one parent had abandoned the other, both would abandon the child leaving him unprotected in a scary world. It is reasonable to ask, Are the bad consequences of divorce really caused by divorce itself or by the family disharmony that precipitated the split? Even thoug...
