Lower the drinking age to 18, raise the marrying age to 25.
The blog post, The Children of Divorce, posted on Minnesota Public Radio's website previews an upcoming story on the "divorce boom" that occurred in the 70's in this country.
The post caught me totally off guard, but then immediately made sense to me... After all, I am the product of the "divorce boom", my parents divorced 30 years ago, exactly at the peak of all the divorces. I am anxious to listen to the hour-long documentary on Wednesday.
The blog post contains the following excerpt, discussing the impact of all of the divorces on the people most affected: the kids.
As a result, some of the children of divorce whose lives Wallerstein has followed (their average age at the latest interviews was 33) have grown up to be pathological commitment-phobes, expecting all relationships to end in disaster and pain. Others, going to the opposite extreme, have rushed into reckless, spur-of-the-moment, almost invariably doomed marriages in their late teens or early 20s, or selected clearly inadequate partners who are too weak and needy to leave. Even those who are happily married remain haunted by fear of abandonment and have trouble dealing with any disagreement or conflict.
As I was reading this, I immediately recognized myself in some of this, as well as many of my closest friends who have also been affected by their parents divorcing. I will wait to comment more until I listen to the entire documentary, but one thing is for sure... I often forget that there is a reason I see things differently than many people that I spend time with. I grew up differently, I experienced divorce twice, and that has an impact that I often forget to take into account when wondering why I am just a little bit different in the way I relate to others.
The post caught me totally off guard, but then immediately made sense to me... After all, I am the product of the "divorce boom", my parents divorced 30 years ago, exactly at the peak of all the divorces. I am anxious to listen to the hour-long documentary on Wednesday.
The blog post contains the following excerpt, discussing the impact of all of the divorces on the people most affected: the kids.
As a result, some of the children of divorce whose lives Wallerstein has followed (their average age at the latest interviews was 33) have grown up to be pathological commitment-phobes, expecting all relationships to end in disaster and pain. Others, going to the opposite extreme, have rushed into reckless, spur-of-the-moment, almost invariably doomed marriages in their late teens or early 20s, or selected clearly inadequate partners who are too weak and needy to leave. Even those who are happily married remain haunted by fear of abandonment and have trouble dealing with any disagreement or conflict.
As I was reading this, I immediately recognized myself in some of this, as well as many of my closest friends who have also been affected by their parents divorcing. I will wait to comment more until I listen to the entire documentary, but one thing is for sure... I often forget that there is a reason I see things differently than many people that I spend time with. I grew up differently, I experienced divorce twice, and that has an impact that I often forget to take into account when wondering why I am just a little bit different in the way I relate to others.
posted by KLOU | 8:00 PM
1 Comments:
I listened to part of this during my lunch time today. Fascinating.
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