Another triumph of the divorce generation

[fpb]

According to a recent piece of research that the BBC is heavily publicizing, one good third of British teen-agers do not consider their parents people they admire or want to imitate. Even disregarding the obvious notion of teen-age rebellion, this is rather a worrying number. However, the BBC does not draw one clear conclusion from it: if teen-agers have learned to despise or disregard their own parents, does that have nothing to do with the prevalence of divorce? Does it have nothing to do with Mother telling them all kinds of awful things about Fathers, and Father teaching them to hate Mother, and both of them instructing them to repeat the same stories in the divorce court? Stories the more damaging because they were often based on some truths - Father and Mother knew each other, after all, they knew how to defame each other in the most hurtful ways possible?

As I said elsewhere, the reasons for the prevalence of divorce are real and serious. But when you consider the damage it does, let alone the cost, is there no ground for a serious policy of reducing it?

Comments

What God Hath Joined Let No Man Put Asunder

[johncwright.livejournal.com]

You and I, friend, sing from the same sheet of music on this issue. I hate divorce as I hate hell: most of my friend come from broken homes, as do I.

I wish my fellow conservatives would pass here in America a "defense of marriage act", but instead of outlawing homosexual marriage, they outlawed divorce for all but cases of adultery, cruelty or abandonment.

More importantly, I wish the culture was adult enough to have this as part of their unwritten expectations and assumptions, so that the presence or absence of such a law would be moot.

Re: What God Hath Joined Let No Man Put Asunder

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

Or at the very least recognise that Marriage is a serious committment and not something to do on a weekend in Vegas.

I'd be much more liberal than you, in this and in almost everything else, but the huge problem with the liberialisation of society is that we appear to have thought, or remembered, only about rights and not about the responsibilities that ought to be associated with those rights.