Divorced Good at Parenting

Seven Tips to Parenting from Afar 

    Fourteen years after she and her ex-husband decided to divorce, Lori Quaranta still knows for sure that the age-old parental theory to stay in a failing marriage “for the kids,” just does not cut it.

“I must say that if I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t stay together for my daughter,” Quaranta, 50, of Shelton, Conn., said of her 21-year-old, Lindsay. “Growing up in a house with anger, arguing, and a lack of love and affection between parents is more damaging to kids than their parents divorcing.”  

And according to a recent study, Quaranta just might be onto something. Dr. Lisa Strohschein spearheaded a study published in the October issue of the journal "Family Relations," which says that divorced parents do just as well at raising their children as a married couple.

Strohschein, a sociologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, said her findings proved that children of married versus divorced parents “revealed no difference in nurturing, consistent or punitive parenting between the two groups of parents.“So, divorced parents are neither worse parents prior to divorce nor after a divorce has occurred,” said Strohschein, who examined the data as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth.  

But Strohschein is not the first person to break the mold and point out that many children are doing just fine despite the fact that they come from a split home. In 1979, Dr. Constance Ahrons, author of “The Good Divorce,” conducted a 20-year longitudinal study where she interviewed parents three times during a five-year period, and then talked to the adult children 20 years later. Her study showed that 80 percent of the now-adult children have grown to be emotionally stable and successful adults.  

Stability may come, Strohschein said, from the fact that what many parents don’t know is that divorce can often come as a relief to children.“If parents are worried about the effect of divorce on the mental health of their kids, they should know that their kids are probably already having problems well before the divorce itself occurs,” Strohschein said. “Both family conflict and parental depression affect child mental health. “So, some of the effects of divorce are felt early – as parents begin to disengage from one another, they are likely to fight more often and be unhappy, and these family dynamics influence kids’ mental health just as much as divorce would.”


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During a 2005 interview on “Anderson Cooper 360°,” Ahrons said there are “two elements to a good divorce.“One is that the parents get along sufficiently well that they can focus on their kids as parents and be parents,” Ahrons said. “And the other element is that children continue to have relationships with both parents.” Ahrons asserts, however, that, while divorce is never “good,” there are simply better ways to divorce in an effort to ease future problems for children.

Adryenn Ashley, author of "Every Single Girl's Guide to Her Future Husband's Last Divorce,” couldn’t agree more with that assertion. In fact, Ashley often leans on examples such as Bruce Willis and Demi Moore to help explain this concept to parents contemplating divorce. “Parents really need to think like this couple,” Ashley said, referring to the exes who are known for raising their children as a team, celebrating holidays as a family and even vacationing together. “You have to put your kids first,” Ashley said. “Whatever your issues are – put them aside.”