The Children of Divorce (Youth, Family, and Culture)

The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being

Root, Andrew, Clark, Chap

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781441211996
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Why does divorce cause so much strain and long-term distress for children of all ages? Andrew Root, a recognized authority on youth ministry and a child of divorce himself, explains that divorce causes children to question their core identity. Since a child is the product of the union of a mother and father, when that union ends, he or she experiences a baffling sense of loss of self--a loss of his or her very sense of being. Root redirects efforts for assisting children of divorce to first address this fundamental experience. This unique book examines the impact of divorce not only from a theological and spiritual perspective but also from a young person's perspective. It will benefit those who have experienced divorce and those who minister to children of divorce.

1

A History of the Family,
a History of the Self

You will be only the second family to have ever lived there!” we were told when we bought our house. This is not a remarkable fact in a world of suburban housing developments. But in a city neighborhood, with a house built in 1912, it was remarkable. In its nearly one hundred years of existence, this old house had known only the Joneses, and now the Roots, roaming its rooms.

As winter approached, our first year in our new old house, I decided that I would reinsulate the tuck-under garage. I started with the disgusting job of tearing out all the old insulation, standing on a stepladder and pulling out worn mats and dusty newspapers from each rafter. As I moved to the area above the garage door and reached in to pull out another wad of insulation, I heard a strange thud on the floor below me. Peering down through my fogged goggles, I saw what looked like a pack of envelopes. At first thinking that old Mr. Jones must simply have used anything to insulate his garage, I gathered the bunch of letters (there were about thirty of them) and set them aside. At a break I examined them. They were odd; all were addressed to Mr. Jones, but none to the home address. All were postmarked between 1939 and 1945 and written in the same handwriting. Each letter was from the same person, a young woman, requesting the same thing: money. Many mentioned a small child. It appeared that Mr. Jones had quite a secret: a young former or current lover, with his child, living in another state. I could imagine Mr. Jones receiving these letters at work and for some reason taking them home, perhaps for fear that someone at work would find them, or perhaps because he was conflicted and had deep feelings for this young, desperate woman. Whatever the reason was that he brought these letters home, he clearly didn’t want them read; he sneaked out to the garage, grabbed a stool and pushed them deep into the rafters. His secret, kept for almost seventy years, had now spilled onto my garage floor.

As I sat and read these letters, I felt drawn into another world, as if I had been dropped into a 1940s movie. The trees in my yard shrank to their size seventy years ago, my vinyl siding turned to clapboard, and out on the street hybrid Toyota Camrys transformed into loud, gas-guzzling early-model Fords. I could picture Mr. Jones coming home from work, bustling through the door in suit and tie with briefcase trailing him. In the briefcase were the letters that held his secret. Mrs. Jones met him at the door with a kiss and a scotch. I wondered if she knew of his secret, if she knew but refused to admit it, realizing that there was little she could do. I wondered if he really loved her or if my twenty-first-century ideas of love and family would even make sense to Mr. Jones and his wife. I thought about how much our conception of the family has changed in just the last half century and, more radically, how it has changed in the last five hundred to six hundred years.

After reading through the letters, I wondered what to do with them. Mr. and Mrs. Jones had died long ago. Their son, who had lived in the house just before us, was gone as well. As far as we knew, only Posey, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jones, was still living. I wondered if I should tell her what I had discovered. I wondered how she would feel reading this pile of dusty old letters. Maybe she already knew her father’s secret. Or maybe, when reading them, this nearly eighty-year-old woman would feel much as I did when my dad revealed that there were deep secrets in my own parents’ marriage, like my own being was thrown into question. I thought about the young child mentioned repeatedly in the letters, now himself in his seventies. I thought about what scars must exist within him, not having known his father, his very being the secret of an indiscretion. I wondered if Posey, even at eighty, would feel her being shaken upon realizing her father’s affair, when a deep deceptive stream that ran hidden under the history of her existence sprang to the surface. I wondered if discovering that her father’s love and fidelity was divided would feel like a division within her. I decided that I wouldn’t find her, knowing that if it were me, I wouldn’t want to know.

The old letters in my hand were historical. They weren’t bound for exhibition at a museum or an hour-long Dateline special. But they possessed a historical reality in two very significant ways. First, they possessed the history of these people’s being; each member of Mr. Jones’s family constructed his or her concept of self and world from within the familial social unit Mr. (and Mrs.) Jones had created. This social unit was primary and fundamental. Its history was their own; their individual lives were wrapped around its social life.

Even more, their existence was a product of it: they most basically could not be without it. The family is the fundamental community of the self, for it is (to use a biblical phrase) “bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.” Children are the mysterious by-products of the community of man and woman. The self of the child is dependent on this community for its existence and place in the world. The traditions and rhythms, but also eye color, stature, and chin line, bind the family members into an ontological community with a history. (“You have a temper like your father’s.” “Your nose looks just like Grandpa Hank’s.” “We Roots open one present each on Christmas Eve.”) The secret in the rafters of my garage threatened to puncture this history (thus the reason they were a secret) by making such traits nothing more than a function of biological occurrence. They risked smashing a community of belonging and its traditions on the rocky shores of a hidden history.

Second, these letters were historical in the sense that they pointed to a unique period in the development of the modern understanding of the family. In reading them I felt drawn back to a world that seemed long dead, a world where women seemed powerless and the sense of duty loomed large. But the letters also foreshadowed a world that seemed much more understandable. Written just before the dawn of the 1950s, when the family was seen as a demigod, these letters expressed the fractures in the hidden foundation of the midcentury idea of the family. The fractures would become radically obvious in the mid-1960s and 1970s.

Prelude to a History

Much of the political discourse of the last several decades seems to suggest that “the family” fell straight out of heaven. This view ignores the reality that the family, like all other sectors of culture, is a social construction that is shaped by the flows of history.¹ There was, for instance, a time when the cultural construction of marriage and family made it unlikely and unusual that divorce would occur. It is much more than just insipid forgetfulness or nefarious deception that has led us away from a world where divorce is rare. Rather, changes (some very good ones) in our understanding of self and world have brought new understandings and actions within family, even if it makes us more vulnerable to divorce. Family is a social construction and has never been a monolithic, unchanging concept. In many ways the evolution of the family is a journey through the benefits and backlash of modernity (as we will see more clearly in chapter 2).

The history of the family has followed a broad progression in the last six hundred years: its objective has shifted from property and power mergers, to labor, and then to love. These changes follow the evolution of cultural currents impacted by the Enlightenment, currents that changed us from premodern to modern to late-modern people. Divorce, then, is the tragic underbelly of the liberation of marriage and family from being centered on land or labor to being centered on love. But now, standing in late modernity, we find ourselves with a problem, a problem much like the effects of modernity on scientific discovery or technological advance. It is the problem of risk. Scientifically and technologically, this means we can split the atom, but in doing so can destroy the world. We can construct effective power plants, but they pollute the planet. Similarly, marriage and family are free from the bondage of a harsh earlier world, but free for what? Making family about love heightened the significance of the person (the self), but it left us with a dangerous risk. When marriage is about love between persons, and nothing more, what remains when love is doubted or destroyed? And what about those who are young and dependent on the social structure built only on love; what are they to do if the marriage and family on which they depend disappear along with their parents’ love for each other? And if these dependents, these children, are the product only of love (not part of a political merger or valued as a helping hand), then who are they once the love that created them and their primary community is gone? The remainder of this chapter seeks to sketch the history of marriage’s and family’s progression and confront more fully these questions.

History, it is important to note, is much messier than any account can show. A historical period is never clearly or totally one thing or another. It is often tempting to treat history like TV programming, where one show begins after another ends, and the two never connect. But the movements of history are much more like having multiple Web pages open on the desktop of your computer, reading one while glancing occasionally at another, than they are like the program guide on your cable system. For instance, below I make the argument that the purpose and function of marriage in Western society have moved from mergers to labor to love. While this is broadly true, it is not to say, for instance, that even in the medieval period labor or love were not significant reasons for some people to marry. That said, we turn to a sketch of the family’s history that moves through four broad periods: pre-sixteenth century, sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, nineteenth to twentieth centuries, and late twentieth century. As I mentioned above, this history seeks to examine the effect of the Enlightenment on the conceptions and operations of the family. Therefore, I have taken the liberty to label everything before the arrival of the Enlightenment (and even the Reformation and humanism) pre-sixteenth century. This is not to say there were not familial distinctions and nuances in those thousands of years of history (that would be absurd), but the more comprehensive look is not the story to be told for the argument of this project.

Pre-sixteenth Century: Passing
on Property, Power, and Tradition

What Is Marriage For? Mergers

As a teenager I was always confused, and to be honest, repulsed, by the biblical texts that discussed the need for a man to marry his deceased brother’s wife (Matt. 22:23–28; see also Deut. 25:7–10). It seemed so odd to ears that had been raised on pop love ballads and romantic comedies. It seemed wrong to me, violating my understanding of love and marriage, and even my understanding of God. Of course this cultural practice, which was so important to this society that it became law, was not concerned with love but with lineage. It was beyond tragic for an older brother’s name to disappear from the earth, so the younger brother would marry the widow and provide an heir for his dead brother. Since marriage in that setting had little to do with love, but everything to do with lineage, this law maintained the sanctity of marriage—even if it seemed the opposite to a late-modern teenager.

For most of human history marriage and family has been about securing fortune, land, or line. Stephanie Coontz says, “The system of marrying for political and economic advancement was practically universal across the globe for many millennia.”² In almost all cultures prior to the sixteenth century, marriage was never the choice of the individuals being married but was arranged by parents to benefit the kin unit as a whole. It mattered little whether the couple had affection for, or even knew, each other. What mattered was how the matrimony would benefit the larger group. “Marriage allowed families to pool . . . resources or to establish some kind of partnership between two different kin groups.”³ Especially in Europe where family groups began to assert a permanent right to land and assets, “marriage exchanges became a way of consolidating resources.”⁴ This was true of rich aristocrats and rulers, but also of peasants.

Marriage was a way of making strangers into friends, and enemies into partners; it was a way to hold on to a group’s status and property and maybe even increase it.⁵ For some, marriage was all about business; for others, it was all about survival. But it is clear that in both cases marriage had a functional operation bound in economic and status categories.⁶ Where today beauty makes one’s future marriage prospects hopeful, in the sixteenth century and prior, dowry attracted marriage attention. Just as today’s parents begin saving for college tuition the day a child is born, in the past it was the dowry of a daughter that received attention from her birth. The idea was, much as with college, that with the right amount of saved money you could secure a promising future for your child and your family as a whole. With a larger dowry came suitors that promised a marriage that would benefit the kin unit as a whole. E. J. Graff explains, “The marriage ceremony itself was usually when money (or its stand-in, the ring) actually changed hands.”⁷

Romance and affection had little to do with marriage and family in this setting.⁸ They were not completely absent or undesired, but romance and affection were neither the justification for marriage nor the glue that held the family together.⁹ Marriage was a contract, no doubt to link destinies and identities, but also to link these through a conglomeration of resources and status—not through the romance of individuals.

Childhood

It has been well documented that “childhood” as an idyllic stage of treasured innocence did not exist through early Western history.¹⁰ Instead, children themselves were seen as the seal of an economic and status merger. This is not to say that some parents didn’t adore their children or see them as valuable. However, their value was not measured primarily through individual feelings of adoration, love, and pleasure, but rather by their benefit to the kin unit.¹¹ The job of parents was not to raise children that would love them, but to raise children that could provide continuation of the family name, property, or esteem. To meet this end, fathers and mothers often needed to take a heavy hand in parenting. The existence of the kin unit was dependent on children; the mergers made in marriage were fleeting if children could not continue the economic advantage and possible societal esteem the marriage union offered. Today we often judge a good parent by her or his ability to raise independently thinking and behaving individuals who can seek self-fulfillment. But in the pre-sixteenth-century view, buttressed by the Augustinian theology of original sin, parenting was about breaking a child’s sinful will, a will that could easily threaten the stability, survival, or reputation of the kin unit.¹² Good parenting was not about forging independence in the child, but about securing his or her commitment and contribution to the kin unit. Therefore, once the child was old enough to work (around six or seven), he or she was thrust into the adult world alongside others in the kin unit. There seemed to be simply no such thing as the idea that children were too innocent and too vulnerable to participate in the adult activities necessary to survive in this period. According to Phillippe Ariès, infants and toddlers were often shown little direct affection until they matured. Some have believed this was because of the risk of heartbreak linked to high infant mortality rates and childhood diseases, but it no doubt also had something to do with the perception of a child’s commitment to the kin unit.¹³ If the child was seen as a sinful creature, then intense affection and care would not be offered until the child had shown commitment that reassured parents (and others) of his or her benefit to the family’s future. This may sound harsh to our ears, but that is because it was harsh. At least according to Ariès, parents at this time did not see the need to protect children from the harsh realities of the world. Rather, they needed their children in order to survive in the world and maintain any advantage in it. Of course, this was not possible for infants or toddlers, so they were often treated with suspicion. It has been well documented that children in this period were often called “poor-sighted animals.”¹⁴ What was then regarded as important was not individual development, but instead, having a place, being part of a unit that provided one not with love but with the resources to survive.

While we must be careful to not overstate the severity of parents toward children in this period, we must also not underestimate the severity of the premodern world, wracked by disease, violence, and poverty. The family in this period was much like the buildings that still exist from that period. While few people actually lived in castles, the family itself (as kin unit) functioned like a castle, even for poor agrarian peasants living on dirt floors. That is, if the family was cold and rigid, it was also a solid structure that provided protection, order, and shelter within its walls. It ultimately promised survival in an unshakable environment.

But a castle is a rigid, unmovable structure, and wasn’t the family an ever-changing unit, due to high mortality rates and the common practice of children leaving home and kin to work for others? This argument has often been used to support the belief that the high divorce rate of our time is no more a disturbance to families and their children than have been upheavals at other periods in history. It was commonly asserted that children in this period would be shipped out of the family at age nine or ten to go work for wealthier families, or on land far from the place of the biological kin unit. But some recent historians have argued, Colin Heywood most directly, that this has been overstated.¹⁵ No doubt children left home for work or (for young girls) marriage, but it was much more common for the departing child to be between fifteen and twenty years old rather than the often-assumed seven or eight. So the kin unit was much more stable than many have imagined. Children lived with and worked alongside parents, uncles, and cousins for many years before leaving the family on their own accord (which was rare) or because of the family’s need (which was more common).

But what about the intrusions and divisions of death? It is true that many children lived through the death of a parent in their early years and that for most spouses, even those marrying very young, the years spent in marriage were much fewer than today’s, since life expectancy has almost doubled. Therefore, wasn’t the family just as vulnerable to breakups then as it is today? This argument too easily equates our feelings of the family with those of the past. It also ignores the historical journey of modernization and its effect on our conception of the self (which we will examine below). In the pre-sixteenth century world, the death of a biological parent was no doubt tragic and threatened the family greatly, but the effects were more devastating economically than emotionally. Because the family was built not on emotional connection (love), but mergers of kin units, when a parent died the children still found themselves securely cemented (whether for good or bad) within a narrative, tr...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• CONTENTS
• SERIES PREFACE
• PREFACE
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. A HISTORY OF THE FAMILY, A HISTORY OF THE SELF
• 2. MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE IN LATE MODERNITY: BEING AND ACTION IN GIDDENS’S SOCIAL THEORY
• 3. DIVORCE AS AN ISSUE OF BEING: ONTOLOGICAL SECURITY AND THE LOSS OF SELF
• 4. DIVORCE AND THEOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
• 5. DIVORCE AND THE IMAGE OF GOD: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN THEOLOGY AND OBJECT RELATIONS PSYCHOLOGY
• 6. WHAT IS TO BE DONE: THE CHURCH AS A COMMUNITY FOR THE BROKEN
• NOTES