The Divorce Revolution: How a Social Tragedy Became a Personal Preference

A lot of people will tell you that divorce isn't a problem today. They’ll say divorce rates are decreasing and divorce doesn’t harm children, anyway.

The story is much more complicated—a fascinating tale of academic fashions, hidden quantitative dynamics, and mass psycho-social displacements.

In the 1980s, at the same time we became paranoid about kidnappings and satanic child-abuse rings, we became strangely comfortable with parents reneging on their duties to their own children.

Most people in the civilized world, for most of history, believed that divorce harms children. It was only in the 1980s that a small number of unsophisticated academic studies whitewashed divorce, paving the way for today's perception that divorce is just one of many ethically neutral lifestyle choices.

Thanks to advances in social-scientific methodology, especially the rise of adoption studies, we now have compelling evidence that divorce probably does harm young children. The evidence suggests that only in exceptional situations is divorce beneficial for children. Namely, in contexts of extreme marital strife and abuse. But the existence of such rare cases is used, incorrectly, to justify divorce in cases of quotidian marital dissatisfaction. Many individuals now believe divorce is a reasonable solution to mere ennui.

When we look at the data, apparent declines in divorce prevalence over the past few decades are confounded by decreasing marriage rates. As a percentage of marriages, divorces are substantially more prevalent today than they were before the Divorce Revolution.

Finally, the divorce trend has recently mellowed only for upper-class folks. The Divorce Revolution has continued to tear through the working class with greater ferocity every year since the Divorce Revolution first started.