A stranger asked 16-year-old Frank Abagnale Jr. to make a choice he could not make. Standing in a family court, learning for the first time that his parents were divorcing after 26 years of marriage, a judge matter-of-factly asked him to choose between living with his father or his mother. “There was no choice,” Abagnale remembers, “so I ran.” By the time Abagnale’s parents followed him outside the courthouse, he was gone.
As described in the best-selling book, Academy Award-nominated film and Broadway musical “Catch Me If You Can,” for the next five years Abagnale survived as a runaway by becoming one of the world’s most famous imposters. Tall and mature looking for his age, Abagnale faked and forged his way as a pilot, physician, lawyer, and more. He was eventually caught and imprisoned, first in France, then Sweden, and finally the United States.
In 1969, the year Abagnale was arrested in France, California became the first U.S. state to permit no-fault divorce, other states followed, and divorce rates skyrocketed in the ’70s and ’80s. At the time, social scientists and politicians believed divorce would have little effect on children. Indeed, the logic was that kids would be happy if their parents were happy. And certainly parents would be happier if they were “free” from the pain of unhappy marriages. But decades of research since then suggest a different reality.
Judith Wallerstein “touched off a national conversation” in the early 1990s with her 25-year-long, in-depth study of children of divorce. In every area of development — social, emotional, physical, academic and spiritual — children whose parents divorced were two to three times more likely to struggle compared to children who did not go through a divorce.
As if describing Abagnale’s life, she concluded, “Divorce is a life-transforming experience. After divorce, childhood is different. Adolescence is different. Adulthood — with the decision to marry or not and have children or not — is different. Whether the outcome is good or bad, the whole trajectory of an individual’s life is profoundly altered by the divorce experience.”
In today’s world, many married couples face a grueling crossroads in which spouses must ask: Should I keep trying to work this marriage out? Do I stay unhappily married? Can this marriage ever be happy again? No one marries thinking they will come to this place, but the reality is that many do.
Couples facing this crossroads in decades past might have been counseled just to move on and look for more happiness elsewhere. But today, with a little more knowledge, the answer would be different. In certain situations, divorce may be the best answer. Researchers Hawkins and Fackrell offer advice in their “Guidebook for Individuals and Couples at the Crossroads of Divorce.” As they write, “Individuals have the right to be physically and emotionally safe in a relationship. And society has the right to try to protect the moral boundaries of marriage to preserve the integrity and even sacred nature of such an important institution as marriage.” Children in high-conflict marriages (yelling, screaming, throwing things, sometimes violence and abuse) are “actually better off, on average, if their parents decide to divorce, compared to children whose parents stay married and continue to experience high levels of conflict.”
But half or more of all divorces happen in marriages that are not experiencing high levels of conflict. Children in these broken marriages generally “do worse” when their parents divorce. Indeed, “the children who seem to be hardest hit by divorce are those whose parents weren’t having a lot of conflict.”
Equally important, Hawkins and Fackrell report that couples who were at some point very unhappy can become happy again. Research that followed low-conflict, unhappy marriages over five years found that of the 85 percent who stayed married, two-thirds were happily married five years later. Hawkins and Fackrell conclude, “If you are in a low-conflict but unhappy marriage there may be ways to make your marriage happy again. If this is possible, this will probably be best for your children.”
What happened to Abagnale? After serving four years of his 12-year sentence in the U.S., he was released on the condition that he assist federal authorities investigating fraud. For more than 40 years, he has advised the FBI and is now a world-recognized security expert.
When Abagnale tells his story from his “point of view,” he is unflinching about the effect of divorce. “All children are entitled to their mother and their father. And though it is not popular to say so, divorce is a very devastating thing for a child to deal with, and then have to deal with the rest of their natural life.”
But Abagnale is also grateful to have been “brought up in a great country where everyone gets a second chance.” Ultimately, children of divorce are responsible for how they respond to less than ideal circumstances. But rather than assuming children can cope with divorce, some parents might instead give their marriages a “second chance.”
Michael Erickson is an attorney. Jenet Erickson is a former assistant professor at Brigham Young University.