4 Breaking Up

Brothers, Sisters and Divorce

DIVORCES COME IN A lot of flavors. There are amicable ones and acrimonious ones, quick ones and protracted ones. There are divorces that require the division of land and fortunes and those that call for nothing more than loading half the furniture into a moving van. No two bust-ups are exactly alike, except in one respect: they can all be murder on the kids.

Children are often the collateral casualties of even the most civilized separation. Parents may tell themselves that they’re shielding the kids from the worst of things—that they’re answering all their questions, helping them explore their feelings and otherwise following the guidance of the child-rearing books—and maybe they are. But that doesn’t mean the experience isn’t going to be lousy and hard and scarring anyway. It just means it may be less so.

Spouses who are parting are sometimes surprised by this fact—by how little they can do to protect their kids completely from the upheaval—but they shouldn’t be. Of all the different two-person relationships in the home, it’s the mom-and-dad unit that’s easily the most important. The spousal partnership is what psychologists call the “executive function” of the family: the management suite through which stability is established and policy is made. Eliminate it, or even temporarily disrupt it, and the entire enterprise is shaken.

And when that happens, the kids feel the effects fast and first. Children are particularly susceptible to injury in such a volatile atmosphere because their minds are works in progress. Just as environmental toxins such as lead and mercury do more damage to the young, developing brain than to the fixed, adult one, so too do emotional toxins have a more destructive impact on an unformed psyche. But if all kids suffer differently, none of them escape unscarred—and that’s particularly bad news in the U.S. and other Western nations, simply because divorce is so common here.

If you believe the common wisdom, about 50% of American marriages eventually break up. While that’s a handy and universally cited data point, it’s also misleading, if only because there are so many different ways to crunch the numbers. Widely accepted surveys from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention do show that there are currently 7.1 marriages and 3.5 divorces per year for every 1,000 Americans, which brings you in almost exactly at the 50-50 mark. The problem is that the number of divorces is not the same as the number of individuals who get divorced. The bust-up rate for first marriages, for example, is about 41%. For second marriages it’s 60%; the third time around it’s 73%. One serially marrying man, therefore, can account for nearly all of the divorces in his 1,000-person population group but only three out of the seven marriages. There will still be four more men who get married and stay married, putting the per-groom divorce rate at just 20%. Still, no matter what the precise numbers are, it’s safe to say that it’s been a long time since divorce lawyers in the United States suffered any shortage of business.

It’s not easy to measure the different psychic wounds a broken family inflicts on the kids, at least not with any empirical certainty, but lots of good studies have tried. An ambitious British-Canadian study published in the Journal of Divorce and Remarriage broke down some of the less discussed but distressingly common symptoms kids exhibit as their parents are splitting up. According to the study, as many as 80% of children become preoccupied with the idea of their parents’ separation, often to the exclusion of other things; 53% try to cope with that ruminaton by pretending that the divorce hasn’t taken place, and 42% suffer significant concern about the custodial parent, usually worrying much less about the parent who has actually left the family. Most painfully, 25% of kids blame themselves for the divorce. That problem turns up most frequently in the 3-to-5 age group—or precisely the age at which kids may in fact have the least power to influence the conduct of the adults around them.

Children are often the collateral casualties of even the most civilized separation.

Among children, there are as many different reactions to divorce as there are kinds of divorces. Often those reactions take parents by surprise

The emotional drama of divorce plays out not only within the kids’ psyches or between the parents and the kids but also in the relationships between the brothers and sisters themselves. Psychologist Thomas O’Connor of the University of Rochester Medical Center is fond of quoting the opening lines of Anna Karenina —“Happy families are all alike; all unhappy families are unhappy in their own way”—and that’s never truer than when siblings are watching their own households dissolve.

Of all the blows sibling relationships sustain during the divorce, the worst occur as a result of custody battles. It’s hard enough when separating parents start arguing over weekends and summer vacations, leaving the kids to watch as their calendar is carved up. It’s much worse when the animosity is so great—and the pre-divorce alliances so entrenched—that different children actually wind up living with different parents. This kind of live-property division, with the family being broken up like a shared dinette set, is less common than it used to be, in part because so many studies of children in divorced or foster homes have shown how vital it is for brothers and sisters to be housed together, and many judges have heeded those warnings. This is smart for several reasons.

For one thing, children whose parents separate may feel an acute sense of longing for the noncustodial parent, a life change that can often push their still-undeveloped coping skills to the limits. That pain will only be exacerbated if they must absorb the loss of a full-time sib as well. What’s more, shared trauma is, as a rule, milder trauma, and a complete complement of empathic siblings will typically bear the pain of a divorce much more easily than the individual components of a smaller broken group can.

25% of kids who are emotionally damaged by divorce take the responsibility for the split on themselves.

Parents don’t have to be tearing at sibs so deliberately to pull them away from one another. The mere fact of divorce can do that damage all by itself. Children use their parents as models for conflict resolution and then use their siblings as handy lab partners with whom to rehearse what they’re learning. When the behavior they’re observing is fractious and dysfunctional, it’s hardly a surprise that the behavior they practice with one another is at greater risk of turning out the same way. “If you have a conflicted marriage, there is a view that says the sibling relationship may provide a buffer,” says O’Connor. “But this is a romantic view. Where would the kids pick up the ability? If you are surrounded by conflict, how is it possible that a sibling relationship will develop that’s positive, intimate and supportive?”

That is an unusually bleak view of things, but O’Connor is not alone in taking it. Family specialist Mark Feinberg of Penn State University sees a number of mechanisms at work during divorce that may lead to particularly serious stress cracks among siblings. Competition for Mom’s and Dad’s time, attention and approval is one of them. Even under the best of circumstances, those resources are limited. In times of marital discord—especially when that discord is moving toward divorce—parents are even more distracted than usual and have even less energy for caregiving. What’s more, it’s awfully hard for them to toggle between the anger and acrimony they’re exchanging with each other and the gentleness and warmth they still owe the kids. The result is often that the kids get snapped at or frozen out too.

“Parenting is hard enough,” says Feinberg. “Divorce undermines parents’ efficacy and their ability to remain calm and cope well with their children. All this leaves the kids fearing that there’s less affection available for them and that ultimately they may be abandoned.”

Like all litter mates in such a situation, the sibs will switch into a sort of emotional survival mode, turning on one another in order to grab what little nurturing there is to be had. The longer this zero-sum battle for parental care goes on—and the more intensely it’s fought out—the less likely that the wounds will heal when the crisis passes and the family settles down into some measure of post-divorce peace.

Worse than the fang-and-claw business of competing for their divorcing parents’ love, siblings may also blame one another for the fact that the family broke up. It’s a mercy that only 25% of kids who are emotionally damaged by divorce take the responsibility for the split on themselves. But some of those who don’t instead direct the finger-pointing outward. Occasionally there are grounds—typically minimal ones—to make such a charge: children with particular emotional, behavioral or even health problems do place added strains on a marriage, and when that marriage is weak or breaking down, the extra stress may accelerate the collapse. But at worst, a child’s contribution ought to be a marginal thing, and the parents, as stewards of their own union, bear the sole responsibility for what happens to it. Still, kids don’t always see things that way, and when they’re mourning the dissolution of their home and the family life they once knew, the temptation may be great to charge a sib with the crime. “In a lot of these cases,” says Feinberg, “the kids start out by thinking, ‘Is this because of me?’ Later they’ll deflect and decide that, no, this is because of the other sibling.”

Torn drawings of family life represent the feelings of fear and uncertainty that children almost inevitably feel when their parents decide to divorce.

One study from Wake Forest University surveyed 500 children from 365 post-divorce families, looking for three powerful markers of emotional maladjustment: depression, behavior problems and poor school performance. The good news from the study was that children can often adjust to a new family structure with comparative ease, particularly when custody is shared and the kids get more or less equal time living in both their parents’ homes. But such a happy outcome is by no means guaranteed. In those families in which the kids had a harder go, the investigators found that the parents typically made at least one of three mistakes: they asked the children to carry messages to the other parent, they spoke ill of the other parent, and they pumped the kids for information about the other parent. By themselves, those things are comparative misdemeanors—and even understandable ones, given the emotional turmoil the parents themselves are going through. But such behavior can also strain the kids’ sense of parental loyalty—which is usually stressed enough already—and create tension among the siblings themselves, who may have different views of which parent is most to blame for the divorce.

None of this means that even an ugly divorce has to damage the sibling bonds. Psychologist Shirley McGuire of the University of San Francisco has studied the myriad ways parental dysfunction can trickle down to the kids but has given equal attention to the means by which many kids slough off that poor parental behavior, sometimes getting through divorce with their relationships actually strengthened by the experience. In some cultures, this resilience is more common than in others, but ours, regrettably, is not among the best-performing ones. The Western world’s move away from sibling alloparenting—the practice of older brothers and sisters helping to raise younger children, even in intact households—has had a leveling effect on power relationships among siblings, with all of the kids essentially becoming peers on the family organizational chart. When parents divorce, it thus becomes tougher for the senior sibs to step into the breach, or at least to do so effectively. Siblings who are born in relatively rapid sequence may enjoy a particular kind of buffering from the worst effects of divorce. As a rule, the closer in age children are, the more similarly they process emotions such as fear, sorrow, loss and confusion, and that can be a very good thing. A confused 6-year-old, an alienated adolescent and a high-schooler with one foot already out the door are simply not going to be occupying the same emotional terrain as kids who are all still riding the same school bus, keeping the same hours and counting on their parents for the same kinds of care. Such children share an innate understanding of what they’re all experiencing and, as a result, can pull together more readily. “You can observe this between twins too,” McGuire says. “The children see their parents’ relationship dissolving, and in effect they say to one another, ‘We can stop this. We can create something different among ourselves.’ ”

And gender does not have to be any bar to the brood’s surviving intact. This refutes what psychologists and sociologists call the “femaleness assumption,” the popular belief that it takes the presence of a girl or a woman in any intimate group to get the most out of the members emotionally, simply because females communicate more readily among themselves and encourage males to do the same. When it comes to siblings, a shared trauma—particularly the trauma of divorce—easily trumps gender.

For a master’s thesis on sibling relationships, Paige Herrick of Baylor University recruited 263 male and female subjects, all of whom had at least one close sibling, and asked them to describe a single experience that served as a positive turning point in their relationship—a moment that drew them close in an enduring and transformative way. The method she used to measure the impact of such experiences was a combination of essays, questionnaires and other testing tools called the Inclusion of the Other in the Self (IOS) scale, a term that describes well the emotional enfolding between the siblings she was looking to capture. There were a lot of life incidents that scored high on the IOS scale—an illness or a sacrifice of some kind, say; for one girl it was merely the time her brother gave up playing in an important football game to be with her in the hospital. But again and again, one of the most powerful interpersonal hinge points was a divorce the siblings experienced together.

“We can stop this,” the children say. “We can create something different among ourselves.”

Sometimes divorce can strengthen the bonds between siblings, such as when an older sibling steps in to help a younger one or when they provide comfort and company to each other.

“After my parents got divorced, we felt like we had to stick together more than we did,” wrote one girl.

“My sister and I grew closer because my parents would play tug-of-war with us,” one brother responded. “Also, we spent more time with each other than with either of our parents.”

Another subject answered simply, “When our father left the household, we trusted only each other.”

It’s that phenomenon—that unity-through-adversity dynamic—that can sometimes make divorce such a paradoxical force for good among siblings. Yes, people who go through any crisis sometimes emerge from the experience wanting nothing to do with the people with whom they survived it, the post-traumatic emotions causing the mere presence of other survivors to stir too many painful memories. And a certain share of kids who endure the dysfunctional mess of divorce will similarly grow up and walk away from their original families, vowing to build their own, stronger nuclear brood and to avoid as much as possible anyone involved in the horror show that was their earlier life. But others who make it out of the familial foxhole alive will react completely differently—developing a deep and indelible love for the people who survived with them, one that is stronger than it was before the shooting started.