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What do other studies show? There is no question that the losses resulting from parental divorce disrupt children's lives. How often? And for how long? The answers differ. Data from the records of 11,759 British children born in 1958 and followed until 1992 showed that at age 7, children whose parents would later divorce were more likely to have emotional problems than those whose parents would stay together. Andrew Cherlin, co-author of the 1995 longitudinal study of those children (18) notes that the gap between the two groups increased in the years after divorce, although the actual proportion of children with problems remained relatively low (19). By age 23, 13.7 percent of the children in the non-divorced group showed evidence of mental health problems, compared to 18 percent of those whose parents had divorced: a 31 percent difference between two relatively small percentages (19). E. Mavis Hetheringon and colleagues, analyzing research published between 1978 and 1998, observed that problem behaviors and disruptions of psychological well-being are commoner in children whose parents divorced than among children whose parents did not divorce, but that there is little agreement about the extent, severity, and duration of these problems (4). In a 1994 interview quoted in Stephanie Coontz's authoritative analysis of contemporary American families, The Way We Really Are, Hetherington made the following observation: "Twenty to 25 percent of kids from divorced families have behavior problems - about twice as many as the ten percent from non-divorced families. You can say, 'Wow, that's terrible,' but it means that 75 to 80 percent of kids from divorced families aren't having problems, that the rest are doing perfectly well" (20).
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