[acb-hsp] FW: MountainWings:Tuesday - The Top Ten Myths of Divorce

Tue Dec 20 19:14:36 EST 2011

Thanks for sending this, Andy.  I used to receive Mountainwings and got off 
it when an email changed or something.  Have just resubscribed.

Jessie Rayl
thedogmom63 at frontier.com
www.facebook.com/Eaglewings10
www.pathtogrowth.org

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Baracco, Andrew W" <Andrew.Baracco at va.gov>
To: <acb-hsp at acb.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 20, 2011 11:12 AM
Subject: [acb-hsp] FW: MountainWings:Tuesday - The Top Ten Myths of Divorce

What do you think of this one?

 -----Original Message-----
 From: MountainWings [mailto:wings at mountainwings.com]
 Sent: Monday, December 19, 2011 9:10 PM
 To: Andy Baracco
 Subject: MountainWings:Tuesday - The Top Ten Myths of Divorce

 -------------------------------------------------
 MountainWings       A MountainWings Moment
 #11354         Wings Over The Mountains of Life
 -------------------------------------------------

 If you are wondering why I'm sending this issue now, read this
 issue: http://www.mountainwings.com/past/10256.htm

 The Top Ten Myths of Divorce
 =============================

 1- Half of all marriages end in divorce.

 That may have been the case several decades ago, but the
 divorce rate has been dropping since the early 1980s. If
 today's divorce rate continues unchanged into the future, the
 chances that a marriage contracted this year will end in
 divorce before one partner dies has been estimated to be
 between 40 and 45 percent.

 2- Because people learn from their bad experiences, second
 marriages tend to be more successful than first marriages.

 Although many people who divorce have successful subsequent
 marriages, the divorce rate of remarriages is in fact higher
 than that of first marriages.

 3- Living together before marriage is a good way to reduce the
 chances of eventually divorcing.

 Many studies have found that those who live together before
 marriage have a considerably higher chance of eventually
 divorcing. The reasons for this are not well understood. In
 part, the type of people who are willing to cohabit may also
 be those who are more willing to divorce. There is some
 evidence that the act of cohabitation itself generates
 attitudes in people that are more conducive to divorce, for
 example the attitude that relationships are temporary and
 easily can be ended.

 4- Divorce may cause problems for many of the children who are
 affected by it, but by and large these problems are not long
 lasting and the children recover relatively quickly.

 Divorce increases the risk of interpersonal problems in
 children. There is evidence, both from small qualitative
 studies and from large-scale, long-term empirical studies,
 that many of these problems are long lasting. In fact, they
 may even become worse in adulthood.

 5- Having a child together will help a couple to improve their
 marital satisfaction and prevent a divorce.

 Many studies have shown that the most stressful time in a
 marriage is after the first child is born. Couples who have a
 child together have a slightly decreased risk of divorce
 compared to couples without children, but the decreased risk
 is far less than it used to be when parents with marital
 problems were more likely to stay together "for the sake of the
 children."5

 6- Following divorce, the woman's standard of living plummets
 by seventy-three percent while that of the man's improves by
 forty- two percent.

 This dramatic inequity, one of the most widely publicized
 statistics from the social sciences, was later found to be
 based on a faulty calculation. A reanalysis of the data
 determined that the woman's loss was twenty seven percent
 while the man's gain was ten percent. Irrespective of the
 magnitude of the differences, the gender gap is real and seems
 not to have narrowed much in recent decades.

 7- When parents don't get along, children are better off if
 their parents divorce than if they stay together.

 A recent large-scale, long-term study suggests otherwise.
 While it found that parents' marital unhappiness and discord
 have a broad negative impact on virtually every dimension of
 their children's well-being, so does the fact of going through
 a divorce. In examining the negative impacts on children more
 closely, the study discovered that it was only the children in
 very high conflict homes who benefited from the conflict
 removal that divorce may bring. In lower-conflict marriages
 that end in divorce-and the study found that perhaps as many
 as two thirds of the divorces were of this type-the situation
 of the children was made much worse following a divorce. Based
 on the findings of this study, therefore, except in the
 minority of high- conflict marriages it is better for the
 children if their parents stay together and work out their
 problems than if they divorce.

 8- Because they are more cautious in entering marital
 relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid
 the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home
 broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own
 marriages as those from intact homes.

 Marriages of the children of divorce actually have a much
 higher rate of divorce than the marriages of children from
 intact families. A major reason for this, according to a
 recent study, is that children learn about marital commitment
 or permanence by observing their parents. In the children of
 divorce, the sense of commitment to a lifelong marriage has
 been undermined.8

 9- Following divorce, the children involved are better off in
 stepfamilies than in single-parent families.

 The evidence suggests that stepfamilies are no improvement
 over single-parent families, even though typically income
 levels are higher and there is a father figure in the home.
 Stepfamilies tend to have their own set of problems, including
 interpersonal conflicts with new parent figures and a very
 high risk of family breakup.

 10- Being very unhappy at certain points in a marriage is a
 good sign that the marriage will eventually end in divorce.

 All marriages have their ups and downs. Recent research using
 a large national sample found that eighty six percent of
 people who were unhappily married in the late 1980s, and
 stayed with the marriage, indicated when interviewed five
 years later that they were happier. Indeed, three fifths of
 the formerly unhappily married couples rated their marriages
 as either "very happy" or "quite happy."

 Additional Myths
 It is usually men who initiate divorce proceedings

 Two-thirds of all divorces are initiated by women. One recent
 study found that many of the reasons for this have to do with
 the nature of our divorce laws. For example, in most states
 women have a good chance of receiving custody of their children.
 Because women more strongly want to keep their children with
 them, in states where there is a presumption of shared custody
 with the husband the percentage of women who initiate divorces
 is much lower. Also, the higher rate of women initiators is
 probably due to the fact that men are more likely to be "badly
 behaved." Husbands, for example, are more likely than wives to
 have problems with drinking, drug abuse, and infidelity

 ~from the National Marriage Project's Ten Things to Know
 Series~ http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/tenthingsseries.html

 Thank you for inviting MountainWings into your mailbox.
 Change a life, give a friend MountainWings.
 See you tomorrow.

 Forward this issue to a friend or click the Share Link below
 to Print, Share by Email, Facebook, Blog or many other services:
 http://www.mountainwings.com/past/11354.htm

 ****************************************************************
     www.MountainWings.com "Wings Over The Mountains of Life"
 To: Subscribe, Un-Subscribe, Get a Book, T-Shirt, Rate Issues,
 Tell Friends about MountainWings, Read Past Issues, Donations,
 Submit a MountainWings Moment or Prayer Request, Set homepage
 to Daily issue in larger type Go To:
 http://www.mountainwings.com Click to unsubscribe:
 http://www.mountainwings.com/remove.html
 ****************************************************************
 MountainWings, POBox 43725, 120 Selig Dr., Atlanta, GA 30336
 USA You are subscribed as: wq6r at socal.rr.com

_______________________________________________
acb-hsp mailing list
acb-hsp at acb.org
http://www.acb.org/mailman/listinfo/acb-hsp 