<p>Bay, I agree completely with Cardinal Fang that you have absolutely no basis for claiming that divorce per se is a contributing factor in mass killings. But let’s accept for a moment the proposition that children of divorce and children of absent fathers have worse outcomes in general than children of two-parent families. And let’s pretend that that conclusion still holds after we control for pure economics (low-income families are less likely to have intact marriages, and single-parent households are likely to have lower incomes).</p>
<p>I haven’t followed this issue in a long time, but years ago I did, and even took a course on the interaction between law and psychology research, co-taught by Michael Wald (a legal expert on child welfare issues) and Eleanor Maccoby (an eminent researcher on developmental psychology), that mostly focused on issues around keeping families intact or not. Back then, both of them were deeply skeptical that anything we knew about the effects of divorce or other forms of family separation was robust enough to provide policy guidance for legislators and courts, and their main theme was to understand the limits of what the research meant. It was essentially impossible to do controlled studies, or to do careful longitudinal studies that extended more than a few years. And what data there was had the constant issue that, almost by definition, families that stayed intact were far more functional than families that never formed, or that broke apart. It was always easy to conclude that children with two parents who lived with them, respected one another and worked well together did better than children of divorced parents. It was never easy to figure out whether children of divorced parents did better or worse than children of parents who lived together, disliked one another, and undermined each other. There was also a huge chicken-and-egg problem, because nothing exposes weaknesses in a marriage faster than serious problems with children or economics. To some extent, children of divorce did badly because their problems made their parents’ divorce more likely, not the other way around. Meanwhile – and this was a long time ago – what high-quality, focused longitudinal research there was tended to show that children were actually pretty resilient, and the supposed negative effects of divorce might be short-lived.</p>
<p>Anyway, when I read the Peter Lanza article I thought there was plenty of acknowledgement that he felt guilty about his absence, and that things changed for the worse when he remarried. I thought one of the things that the article did not explore explicitly, but that hung in the background all the time, was the possibility that disagreements about how to raise Adam, or different ways of coping with his illness, factored heavily in the demise of the marriage. I feel angry at both parents for letting Adam have access to guns, but that clearly was an important part of Nancy’s life, and something she tried to use to make a connection with her son. If Peter had tried to fight Nancy on that, any Family Court judge in the country would have slapped him down in a minute.</p>
<p>Now, an anecdote:</p>
<p>I have a client who is the divorced father of an autistic child, who hasn’t had any contact with his child in four years. Why? He would say it’s because his vindictive ex-wife, with the help of the court, has set impossible conditions for him to spend time with his child, and has been inflexible and punitive in insisting on complete compliance with them or no access. He loves his son, and not seeing him tears the father apart. She would say all those conditions were necessary because he was an irresponsible drug addict with anger issues and his own mental illness, and that his contact with the child was consistently harmful. She knew he would never be able to comply with them, and good riddance. Plus, he consistently failed to meet his financial obligations, leaving her to carry the considerable financial burden of an autistic child on her own. Guess what? They’re both right. What’s more, this marriage was doomed from Day 1, but no one who knows them at all thinks that they could possibly work together in any but the most basic way on a project as difficult as coping with a profoundly disabled child.</p>
<p>The notion that this kid would have done better had the parents stayed together is ludicrous. If the parents had stayed together, the most likely outcome is that both of them would be dead, or one dead and the other in prison for it. As bad as the situation is – and, after years of patient work, I think it is slowly getting better – the child has probably gotten the best results of which the actual parents were capable at the time. It’s never a question of perfect vs. bad. In the real world, the choice is usually between awful and horrendous.</p>