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KOLVA COLEMAN: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Korva Coleman. President Obama interrupted his Massachusetts vacation today to praise the late senior Senator for Massachusetts. Edward Kennedy died last night. He was 77. The president said Kennedy was a singular figure in American history who touched millions of lives.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We've seen the courage with which he battled his illness. And while these months have no doubt been difficult for him, they've also let him hear from people in every corner of our nation and from around the world just how much he meant to all of us.

KOLVA COLEMAN: World leaders are indeed paying tribute to Senator Kennedy. NPR's Rob Gifford reports from London.

ROB GIFFORD: Britain gave Ted Kennedy an honorary knighthood earlier this year. And British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said today that even facing illness and death, Senator Kennedy never stopped fighting for the causes which were his life's work. Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair, called Kennedy a true public servant, committed to the values of fairness, justice, and opportunity.

Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who's visiting Europe, called Senator Kennedy a great American Patriot and a great champion of a better world. Irish prime minister Brian Cowen said throughout his long and distinguished career in politics, Ted Kennedy was always a great friend of Ireland and worked valiantly for the cause of peace. Rob Gifford, NPR News, London.

KOLVA COLEMAN: One of the leading figures in Iraqi politics has died of lung cancer. Abdul Aziz Al-Hakim headed a Shiite Muslim political movement that propelled Iraq's majority Shiite community to power after the US invasion and the fall of Saddam Hussein. NPR's Deborah Amos reports from Baghdad.

DEBORAH AMOS: Al-Hakim came from a family of clerics and political activists. He returned to Iraq in 2003, headed the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq after his brother was killed in a massive explosion. Hakim shaped Iraqi politics by appealing to sectarian identity, which brought election success but alienated Iraq's Sunni Arabs, who considered him too close to Iran.

After more than 65 of his relatives were killed during Saddam's time, Hakim fled to Iran in the early 1980s. In 2007, he was diagnosed at a Texas Cancer Center but chose treatment in Tehran instead. With such a turbulent family history, he died in bed, surrounded by supporters, family, and friends. Deborah Amos, NPR News, Baghdad.

KOLVA COLEMAN: Election officials in Afghanistan say incumbent president Hamid Karzai continues to lead in presidential voting returns. Afghanistan held its presidential election a week ago, and Karzai and one of his main challengers have until today been neck and neck. The Afghan Election Commission reports now Karzai has nearly 45% of the vote. His nearest challenger has about 35%. However, only about 17% of the vote has been counted. On wall street, The Dow Jones Industrial average is down a point. It's currently at 9,500.37 This is NPR.

SPEAKER: Support for news comes from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation informing health reform with policy research, data, and expert commentary on the web at healthreform.org.

STEPHEN JOHN: From Minnesota Public Radio news, I'm Stephen John. Minnesotans who served in the Senate with Ted Kennedy are praising the Massachusetts Democrat who died last night of brain cancer. DFL Senator Amy Klobuchar says Kennedy's fiery zest for legislative battles were always tempered by a bipartisan pragmatism. Former Republican Senator Dave Durenberger says he valued the 16 years he served alongside Kennedy. Durenberger says Kennedy's most significant skill was his commitment to an issue and his willingness to work with his colleagues on the other side of the aisle.

DAVE DURENBERGER: He would push you right to the end of the session or right to the end of a Markov. And if you continue to say no, he would say, OK, I respect that. Let's try it again next year. And that's why I enjoyed working with him so much.

STEPHEN JOHN: Durenberger says Kennedy was one of the two most enjoyable people he got to work with in the Senate and the one he respected the most. Democratic Senator Al Franken is holding two meetings in the Twin Cities today focusing on health care reform. A roundtable discussion this morning brought together faith leaders, union representatives, health and welfare groups, and consumer advocates. This afternoon's session will focus on women's health issues. Franken is scheduled to meet with an array of women's groups at the Minnesota Women's Building in Saint Paul.

A state health department investigation finds there was neglect by health care workers at a newhope nursing home on the day that a Minnesota priest fell at the facility. The report says the patient, Father Tim Vakoc, fell and hit his head after two employees neglected to make sure he was securely fastened into a lift. He later died. Vakoc was at the facility due to the brain damage he suffered in a bomb blast while in Iraq in 2004. The workers will be disqualified from providing care in any state facility. Sunny to partly cloudy. Highs 75 to 80 this afternoon. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

GARY EICHTEN: Good afternoon. Welcome back to Midday on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Gary Eichten. 30 years ago, the movie Kramer VS Kramer won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Its wrenching depiction of a child custody battle reflected a country reeling from divorce. The year was 1979, the year America's divorce rate peaked.

SPEAKER: It was kind of a sign of the times. '70s, hey, did you get a divorce? No, I got to go get one. Everybody was really pushing it, if you're not happy, get out.

SPEAKER: When my parents divorced, it was the beginning of the divorce boom. So there wasn't a little road map for women, and my mom was young.

GARY EICHTEN: There wasn't a road map for the children either.

SPEAKER: Because all of a sudden, we were on Donahue and for today. And as experts, we are 12 years old.

SPEAKER: We had embarked on this major social revolution without any knowledge of how it might affect children.

GARY EICHTEN: In the next hour, we'll hear how the divorce revolution turned out for the kids, and we'll see how the experience of divorce has changed for children over the past 30 years. Sasha Aslanian has the story.

SASHA ASLANIAN: As a kid growing up in the '70S one of the television ads I remember best was this one for Anjali Perfume. It opens with a striking blonde woman who changes from fuzzy bathrobe to business suit to slinky dress, all while wearing her eight hour perfume.

WOMAN (ON TV): (SINGING) I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never, never, never let you forget you're the man cause I'm a woman.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Our 1970s moms were supposed to be working, raising kids, and keeping their husbands happy. We kids, meanwhile, were listening to Marlo Thomas singing "Free To Be You and me."

MARLO THOMAS (ON TV): (SINGING) Mommies are people, people with children.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Gender roles were changing. It was OK for mom to be a doctor and dad to be a nurse. It was also increasingly OK to leave behind the confining roles of marriage. Divorce laws were loosening up. In 1969, California was the first state to pass no fault divorce, which meant you didn't have to prove infidelity or abandonment. You could just be fed up and call it quits.

In the '70s, no fault laws spread to other states and the divorce rate ticked up. The quintessential divorce movie of the era was Kramer VS Kramer. It came out in 1979. Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep starred as the estranged couple locked in a custody battle over their young son.

SPEAKER: Were you a failure at the one most important relationship in your life? Were you? Is that a yes, Mrs. Kramer?

SPEAKER: Did you have to be so rough on her.

SPEAKER: Do you want the kid or don't you?

SASHA ASLANIAN: The kid they were fighting over doesn't have much of a voice in the movie. It's more a drama about his parents. Avery Corman wrote the novel the movie was based on.

AVERY CORMAN: I know when I saw a screening of it in a movie house for the first time. When I got up, there were kids all around slumped in their seats that I knew exactly who they were.

SASHA ASLANIAN: A lot of people assumed Corman's story was autobiographical. It was, but not in the way they expected. Corman wasn't divorced.

AVERY CORMAN: I was a child of divorce, and it's something I never talked about until recently.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Corman grew up in a middle class neighborhood in the Bronx in the 1940s. Divorce in those days was rare and deeply stigmatized.

AVERY CORMAN: I was virtually the only kid on the block, or maybe in my school whose parents were divorced. Everybody had two parents, and I had one, and I had one because I didn't know where my father was.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Corman's father left when he was five, and he never saw him again.

AVERY CORMAN: It was a kind of family secret, so to say. And as a result, I think I was walking around with a secret. And I think I just became a more of a remote kid than I might have normally been.

SASHA ASLANIAN: By the time he wrote Kramer VS Kramer in the mid '70s, divorce was much more commonplace and the stigma was rapidly disappearing. But Corman still guarded his own secret. Then, a schoolgirl wrote to him from the Midwest. Were your parents divorced, she asked? Yes, he wrote back, they had been.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I was 10 when my parents separated. My parents stayed on good terms. My mom moved two blocks away, and my little brother and I piled our clothes into laundry baskets and went back and forth spending two weeks with mom and two weeks with dad. I have two bedrooms, I'd brag to other kids. I didn't want anyone feeling sorry for me. I bristled at hearing the term broken home. I was fine. My home wasn't broken. I just had two of them. It wasn't until much later in adulthood that I let down my guard a little bit. How had the divorce affected me?

I began reading and asking other people about their experiences. I looked around my book group one night and realized, we were almost all children of the 1970s divorce boom. I persuaded a few of my friends to let me interview them. They were hesitant at first and didn't want their last names used. Why dredge it up again, they asked? It's ancient history. But within seconds of pressing record, I realized I was on completely new ground. Here's Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH: I don't know if you've seen the movie The Ice Storm. But when I saw that, it completely reminded me of my parents. They were swinging with another couple. And so my mother ended up marrying the man who became my stepfather. They later divorced. My dad was engaged to the woman that he was, quote, unquote, 'swinging' with, but they never got married. But I didn't find that out. This whole story didn't really come to light until I was in my 20s.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Elizabeth remembers she and her little sister blame themselves for the divorce. Elizabeth was a first grader. Amy in our book group was eight when her parents separated. My favorite story she tells is about finding a bunch of photographs she and her little sister took of their Barbie dolls around the time of their parents' divorce. All the Barbies are neatly dressed and lined up in a row. In the corner of the shot dangling by one foot is Ken. Amy's dad had just split.

AMY: I thought of it like teams. I thought like we were part of the losing team and we got dumped by the captain.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The captain would return on Sundays to take his daughters for rides on his boat. Amy resented the much lower standard of living she had at her mom's house where grapes and milk had suddenly become expensive. Stephanie from book group was 11 when her dad began to be away for long periods of time. Stephanie remembers picking up on her mom's deep sadness and feeling protective of her.

STEPHANIE: I can remember my mom running to the bedroom a lot if the phone ever rang. She ran to the bedroom to answer it privately. And later, I figured out that she was hoping he was calling and would be talking to him. And she cried a lot. She would tear up easily. And then finally, we got the word from our mom that he was coming home, and he was going to pick us up, and he was going to take us to the mall.

And my brother and I were so excited. We thought we were going to get to go shopping. And she kept telling us over and over, it's not a surprise. It's not a surprise. It's not going to be fun. And we were ecstatic that we were going to see our dad. And we were hopping all over the place. And then he picked us up. I don't think he even came in the house. I think he just waited in the car in the driveway, and then we went.

And he took us to McDonald's, and he told us there-- and my mom had given me a letter to give to him. And he read it in McDonald's before he told us. And then he told us-- it makes my stomach sick to think about it, and he threw the letter in the garbage, the letter that my mom had given us to give to him. And then he told us that they were getting divorced. And then we came home, and my mom and I had a good cry.

And she wanted to know, did you give him the letter? Did you give him the letter? And yes. And did he keep it? She wanted to know. And I said, yes. I somehow knew that that was an important thing. And I said, yes, he did. And my brother, who was five, said, no, he didn't. No, he didn't. He threw it in the garbage. And I said, no, he kept it. And my brother kept, like a five-year-old would, just pounding away. No, he didn't. He threw it away.

SASHA ASLANIAN: This story still feel raw three decades later. These women are all married, mothers themselves now. They're successful in their jobs. You could argue they've turned out fine. But the effects of divorce can be hard to see. For Elizabeth whose parents were the swingers, it took her a long time to realize anything was wrong with her.

ELIZABETH: I grew up always trying to put a positive spin on the divorce for other people. I used to say to my friends and to other people in my family that the divorce made me more independent and really adaptable. That was one of the words that I always used. If people said, what's your greatest strength? I would say, I'm really adaptable, because I moved so many times growing up and changed schools so often and always just was able to roll with it. And I just realized that that was just fiction that I had told myself for years.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Elizabeth wanted everything to be fine, and the culture was giving her that message. Divorce was becoming more common. There wasn't the same stigma as in previous decades, but people didn't really know how divorce would affect kids long term.

SPEAKER: Children of divorce don't always get over it. And in fact, in a disquietingly large--

SPEAKER: Well, my next guest just completed the very first long term study on the effects of divorce on children.

SPEAKER: Here's the woman about whose book all America appears to be talking.

SPEAKER: Dr. Judith Wallerstein, we're glad to have you on the show here.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Judith Wallerstein has sat on many a television studio couch advising the nation on children and divorce. She's a pioneer in the field. When she started, it was a barren landscape. Back in the early '70s, Wallerstein was teaching at the School of Social Welfare at the University of California at Berkeley. She taught a class on working with troubled children. She began getting calls from teachers and parents asking for help. Children of divorcing parents were acting out and having behavior problems.

JUDITH WALLERSTEIN: And so I took myself to the Berkeley library, which is one of the greatest libraries in America, and I found that there was no research. There was absolutely no study that we had embarked on this major social revolution without any knowledge of how it might affect children.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Wallerstein launched a study with 131 kids in Marin County whose parents got divorced in 1971. She interviewed the children about their feelings and experiences, and then she kept following them for decades and wrote bestselling books about her findings. The prevailing wisdom at the time was that if the parents were better off getting out of the marriage, the kids would be better off too. Wallerstein's young study subjects didn't agree. Eventually, other researchers would confirm what the kids were saying. They struggled with more mental health problems, trouble in school, and relationships.

JUDITH WALLERSTEIN: It's one of the few issues in a society where what's best for the parents is not necessarily best for the

SASHA ASLANIAN: Children. After divorce, Wallerstein noticed different trajectories for parents and kids. For grown ups, the divorce was the low point. But within three years, they tended to recover and move on with their lives. For children, it wasn't so linear. They felt the aftershocks during adolescence, when they defined who they were, and again in early adulthood as they created their own relationships.

Other researchers contend Wallerstein's findings are too doom and gloom. It's the kind of kids from a broken home stuff I hated as a child of divorce. But Wallerstein wanted parents to see divorce from a child's point of view. What the kids told her was tough to hear.

JUDITH WALLERSTEIN: They said, the day they divorced was the day my childhood ended.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SASHA ASLANIAN: I do remember. It felt like the sky was falling when my parents gathered my little brother and me in the living room and told us they were separating. It was a bummer day for my parents as well. My dad told me what it was like the day the divorce became final.

PAUL ASLANIAN: And I always remember going to that family court for the day that the divorce was on the blocks, and I really-- there was a part of me that thought that the Earth was just going to stop spinning for just a little nanosecond, just in recognition of this Earth shattering event where my marriage was going to be formally bombed. And going to this family court where you felt like you were a Ford Ranger pickup truck just moving down the assembly line down at the Ford plant just--

The guy never looked at me as a human being, asked me if this marriage was irreconcilably over or damaged or some damn thing. I can't remember exactly. And I started to answer the question with a long, flowery answer. And I was about four words into this first sentence, and still with his head hand in his arm looking away from me and grabbed the mallet and just said, granted. And I thought, is this it? Is that it? Is it over. It was.

[PHONE RINGING]

GERALD RUTMAN: Hello.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Hello, Mr. Rutman.

GERALD RUTMAN: Hi.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Hi. This is Sasha Aslanian calling from Minnesota Public Radio.

GERALD RUTMAN: Yes.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The court referee my dad saw that day was Gerald Rutman. He's retired now to Scottsdale, Arizona, but he's happy to chat. I mailed him a copy of the divorce decree ahead of time. I'm not surprised he remember my parents. So my dad tells a funny story about coming to visit you because--

GERALD RUTMAN: Oh, did he?

SASHA ASLANIAN: Yeah, because, of course, to you, you had thousands of people coming in. But to my dad, this was this was one of the biggest moments in his life--

GERALD RUTMAN: Sure.

SASHA ASLANIAN: --to have to explain the failure of his marriage and--

GERALD RUTMAN: Oh, sure.

SASHA ASLANIAN: So he said he had a big speech that he wanted to deliver to you.

GERALD RUTMAN: Yeah, what did I do?

SASHA ASLANIAN: You slammed down the gavel and said, granted.

GERALD RUTMAN: Oops, sorry.

[LAUGHTER]

But that doesn't sound like me, though. I must have been in a hurry.

[LAUGHTER]

SASHA ASLANIAN: Rutman must have been in a hurry a lot in those days. He worked as a divorce referee from 1970 to 1986 in Ramsey county when the divorce rate was surging. A Saint Paul dispatch reporter wrote, a day in the life piece about Rutman in 1978. The headline was, divorce referee faces human drama daily, and lots of it.

He can tell tales. He remembers when there was no guidance for deciding things like child support. So he priced out various living expenses and made up his own formulas for what families needed to get by. Rutman never met my brother or me the day our dad passed through his courtroom because our parents agreed on our custody.

But Rutman did meet lots of kids who were caught in the middle of horrible custody disputes. He'd meet with them one on one in his office. There, kids would confide secrets they were carrying, like, they knew about their parents affairs, or they worried about a parent who was sad. And they'd ask him questions.

GERALD RUTMAN: They would call me quite often, the children.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Really?

GERALD RUTMAN: Yeah. Well, they weren't in fear of contacting me at all because I'd get friendly with them in the interview with me. And I like that.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Rutman remembers one little boy in particular. He was about 11. His dad had been taking him on fancy weekend boat trips while his mom struggled to get by. The boy wanted to move in with his dad. Rutman decided to keep him with his mom so he'd learn the right values of hard work.

GERALD RUTMAN: And by golly, I got a call at home in the evening from him, the little boy.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Really?

GERALD RUTMAN: Yeah. Very respectful. Very respectful. He says, I understand, but I just can't go back to mom. I realized it would be ridiculous to just be real inflexible about it. So I don't remember what I did, but, I made a more flexible type of situation. So they have a little more breathing space in it.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Oh, so you listened to the little boy after that.

GERALD RUTMAN: Oh, yeah, sure.

SASHA ASLANIAN: OK.

GERALD RUTMAN: Oh my goodness. They know more than the parents.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Kids were the experts. Some of them decided to grab the megaphone. In 1979, 20 middle schoolers at the Fairweather street school, a private school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, did a class project. They wrote, the kids book of divorce by, for, and about kids. Their teacher, Eric Rofes, got it published in 1981. It was dedicated to the past, present, and future children of divorce. The book is slim and upbeat with chapters like Separation, It's not the End of the World, and sometimes wry-- there's a chapter on Weekend Santa. These kids are in their 40s now.

HANNAH GITTLEMAN: Do you guys want to see something?

SASHA ASLANIAN: Hannah Gittleman was one of the writers. She leads her old classmates Louis Crozier, and Jon Tupta around the school's new building. Gittleman teaches woodshop at the Fairweather Street School now.

HANNAH GITTLEMAN: This sign that, says "The office", is the gift that I gave to the school when I graduated.

JON TUPTA: Really?

HANNAH GITTLEMAN: Yeah. If we unscrewed it and looked on the back, it would say Hannah Gittleman, 1979.

JON TUPTA: Wow.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The three old classmates have agreed to come back to the school for a chat. They admit they haven't read their kids book of divorce in years. A scrapbook shows they were media darlings for a time interviewed by the New York Times, Newsweek, and 2020.

SPEAKER: These children are part of one of the fastest growing population groups in the United States. The children of divorce, 13 million--

SASHA ASLANIAN: Gittleman says the kids book of divorce grew out of a recognition that families were changing fast.

HANNAH GITTLEMAN: What I remember is that about halfway through the year, some parent noticed by looking through the Fairweather phone book that 14 out of the 20 kids in our class had two households or, I guess, some were from single parent households and there was just one parent listed. And then Eric started discussions about different kinds of families and about divorce. But somehow around the middle of the year, the regular curriculum just stopped.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Writing the kids book of divorce became their focus. They interviewed adults, like a rabbi, who performed divorce ceremonies. They interviewed other kids about divorce, and they were candid about their own experiences. John Tapcher reads the blurb he wrote about himself.

JON TUPTA: Jon Tupta lives with his mother, two brothers, three cats, three fish, two doves, two hamsters, and one dog in a house in Newton center. He has his own room. He visits his dad in Ohio during the summer and lives with his dad, his dad's secretary, wink, wink, his brothers, and one goldfish.

GARY EICHTEN: Does it say that, wink, wink?

JON TUPTA: No.

[LAUGHTER]

LOUIS CROZIER: That's funny.

JON TUPTA: She just happened to live in the building. No Biggie. No big whoop.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Tupta's parents told him they were getting divorced on his 10th birthday. He ended up moving with his mom and two younger brothers far away from all his childhood friends. Tupta says the Kids Book of Divorce Project gave him a place to talk about his family's situation since there wasn't much opportunity at home. His mom was too busy raising three boys by herself. Hannah Gittleman's family situation was also complicated.

HANNAH GITTLEMAN: Hannah Gittleman lives for two months with her mother in a two family house in Cambridge. Her brother and her mother's boyfriend live there and sometimes her three stepsisters. When the stepsisters aren't there, she has her own room. Every two months, she switches to her dad's house in Watertown where she lives with her brother and three boarders. She does a lot of visiting back and forth.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Louis Crozier's family structure was simpler, just Louis and his mom. But somehow, that felt complicated too.

LOUIS CROZIER: My parents' divorce, I didn't experience it. So really, the aftermath of my parents divorce, which is a single working woman raising a child and trying to balance work and doing a great job with your kid, was overly demanding and overly stressful for my mother. And I mean, to such an extreme that has certainly made a lifetime impression on me.

And I do remember selling candles at the-- making candles in our kitchen and selling them at the craft fair to try to make a little more money for her. And she was a reading teacher in the Arlington Public School System. And so she would commute out there, and be late, and the coffee cups would fly off the roof because she put them on the roof of the car. And it was just a very, very hectic time.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The main point of the Kid's Book of Divorce is that it's OK for families to change and be different. That was a new idea then, even if it doesn't sound revolutionary now, there's practical advice about how life will be different. There are explanations about custody and courts, and there's some surprising wisdom. Things around the House will probably get lost is my favorite.

The book concludes that kid's of divorce will probably be more careful starting their own relationships, and that prediction seems to have been borne out by this group. Louis Crozier says when he was younger, he established a pattern of quitting things. When life got stressful, it was something he saw a single mom doing-- quitting boyfriends and moving apartments every year. As an adult, Crozier says he's made a commitment to hang in there and communicate through the tough times.

LOUIS CROZIER: Now that I have two kids, I'm highly, highly motivated to stay in our marriage, both because it's a wonderful marriage, but also because I felt very directly the implications of single parent raising.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The fair weather kids wrote in their last chapter, another side effect is pain. Sure, most of the pain is gone by the time a kid is an adult or a little younger. But some pain is still there. It'll always be there, for Jon Tupta, whose dad had the Secretary living in the building, most of the pain wasn't gone by early adulthood. He was angry.

JON TUPTA: And it wasn't until I was about 20 that I confronted both my mother and my father about the divorce and what had actually taken place, because I really-- I wanted to put it behind me more than anything else. So I could go and live my own life without that cloud over my head all the time. And I was really glad I did. It was very helpful and very healthy to just be able to go, I don't want to make those mistakes, and I can move on from here because I don't have to repeat their life. I can do something different.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Tupta and his girlfriend have chosen not to marry. They have a son together. Hannah Gittleman, who had the elaborate two month rotation with stepsisters and boarders and her mother's boyfriend and the like, kept things simple a long term relationship in her 30s that didn't lead to marriage. Then a first marriage at age 40. No kids. Gittleman says, she wonders what affect her parents' divorce had on her.

HANNAH GITTLEMAN: It's hard to know how much of the personalities we have now are partly due to that event. There's no way to know. I mean, maybe I'm a less secure person or maybe I'm a more worried person, but I think that that's just how I am. And I think that's how I would be no matter what. But it's so hard to know what we can blame on our parents divorces.

[LAUGHTER]

SASHA ASLANIAN: Actually, quite a lot if you talk with Nick wolfinger. He's a demographer from the University of Utah who pours over giant data sets from the National Survey of families and households tracking children of divorce.

NICK WOLFINGER: The bad news is that you really are much more likely to get divorced as an adult if your parents' divorce. And parental divorce really does affect almost every aspect of your behavior in your own relationships.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Wolfinger book has the ominous title, Understanding the Divorce Cycle, the Children of Divorce in their Own Marriages. It's like reading a mathematical proof that you're doomed.

NICK WOLFINGER: Sasha, this is why I'm so much fun at weddings, because people will ask, well, Nick, what do you do? And I tell them, I study divorce. And they say, so what are the bride and groom's chances?

SASHA ASLANIAN: Wolfinger says when he's put on the spot at weddings, he cherry picks the most optimistic data for the happy couple. He does have some advice for the rest of us.

NICK WOLFINGER: You want to stay married, marry someone just like you. Except if you're from a divorced family, marry someone from an intact family.

SASHA ASLANIAN: That's because Wolfinger found when either the husband or wife was a child of divorce, those marriages were almost twice as likely to dissolve as marriages were neither spouse came from a divorced family. Marriages between two spouses from divorced families were over 3 times as likely to fail. Wolfinger finds children of divorce are more likely to cut and run.

NICK WOLFINGER: If you experience relationships as transitory while growing up, that's what you'll do as an adult.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Wolfinger finds children of divorce are about 50% more likely to end their own marriages. He breaks down the risk factors that many children of divorce bring into their marriages-- marrying young, not finishing your education, living together first. Wolfinger also has some data that surprised me. The age you are when your parents' divorce affects your later success at marriage.

NICK WOLFINGER: Let's say a kid's parents' divorce when he or she is four. Well, most people remarry. So a couple of years later, that kid's going to pick up a stepparent. And then, as you probably know, second marriages have even higher rates of divorce than first marriages. So that kid may experience a second divorce. Now, take in contrast, a kid who's 17 when his parents' divorce. By the time there's a remarriage, he's probably out of the house. So the difficulty is that the age at which a kid initially experiences divorce simply determines exposure to additional family structure transitions.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Wolfinger looked at how having a stepparent affected kids. Remarriage may make a parent happy, and the family looks nuclear again, but it doesn't undo the damage to kids from divorce.

NICK WOLFINGER: You would expect to see good benefits from a stepparent, certainly that restores the income. Single mothers are often poor, but a stepparent may well restore family income to original levels, to parent levels. A step parent still provides a source of social control in the house. Someone to say, do your homework. Don't smoke pot. Don't go to that Ozzy concert, and so forth. And so we would expect the child to benefit. It provides presumably a role model of a good relationship. But the bottom line is that stepparents are not helping kids.

SASHA ASLANIAN: In fact, having a step parent makes a kid even more likely to divorce later in life. Wolfinger thinks having a step parent chose spouses are replaceable if things don't work out. America has learned some lessons from the divorce boom of the 70s-- ugly divorces certainly damaged kids. But what about good divorces where everybody's nice and civilized? Up next, perfecting divorce.

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SPEAKER: Just a reminder, if you have to leave us, we'll be archiving this entire documentary on our website, mprnewsq.org go over to Midday, and go to the Program section, and out this program, Divorced Kid. mprnewsq.org.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SASHA ASLANIAN: You're listening to Divorced Kid on Minnesota Public Radio. It's a look at how the experience of divorce has changed for kids since the divorce rate peaked back in 1979. I'm Sasha Aslanian.

BARNEY: Super dey duper.

SASHA ASLANIAN: A few years ago, my daughters were playing in their bedroom. They were listening to a tape of Barney songs. You know, Barney the purple dinosaur from public television. The lyrics Barney and his little friends were singing caught my ear.

BARNEY: (SINGING) There's a girl I know who lives with her mom. Her dad lives far away. Although she sees her parents just one at a time, they both love her every day.

SASHA ASLANIAN: I thought, when I was little, I don't remember any songs like this about how all families are terrific no matter what they look like. I'm glad kids have that nowadays. So that's one big difference between 1979 and today. There are a lot more kids whose families aren't the traditional nuclear family with mom, dad, and the kids, and Barney's singing on TV that it's all OK.

Kids today have banana splits groups. These are peer support groups for kids whose parents are getting separated or divorced. If you search kids in divorce on Amazon books, you'll get over 2,000 hits for self-help books or children's books that explain divorce. There are a lot of good intentions to make divorce easier on kids. But no matter what, it's an enormous change for most kids. One county that's taken aggressive steps to improve divorce is Hennepin. Judge James Swenson joined the family court bench back in 1995. Back then, by the time a divorce case made it to his chambers, it was already 12 to 18 months old.

JAMES SWENSON: The cases that I got were ones that seemed to be unsettleable with quite a bit of animosity and rancor, which led to unpleasant experiences as a judicial officer, basically getting in the middle and refereeing a fight.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Swenson says the pain for kids involved was readily apparent. Kids were stuck in the middle while the legal process dragged on, and the court costs drained precious family resources, adding to the stress level.

JAMES SWENSON: We wanted to get kids out of the middle of messy custody fights.

SASHA ASLANIAN: So in 2000, Hennepin County tried something different. What if judges acted more like triage nurses and intervened quickly before things got a chance to fester? They would try a completely different tone. At the first meeting with the judge right after filing for divorce, there would be no motions, no judicial robes, and the attorneys would sit on the sidelines.

JAMES SWENSON: The judge would sit down with the parties and talk to them about such things as childhood development, what they could do to help their kids, what would send their kids' mental health south real fast, what they could do to preserve some of their assets for their kids, extracurricular activities or college rather than the lawyers, kid's extracurricular activities in college.

SASHA ASLANIAN: After the initial meeting, the couple would come back a few weeks later and meet with a male and a female custody evaluator. They'd try to come up with a reasonable custody plan that everyone could buy into. A separate meeting dealt with the financial part of divorce. An astonishing thing happened. 65% of cases settled within 30 days. Swenson jokes it was an absolute boon for judges. Even the cases he did have to try were less hostile.

JAMES SWENSON: My number of days in trial went down 35%, and the number of cases that I had where it was highly vitriolic with really ugly testimony and warring by the lawyers dropped off the edge of a cliff.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The average divorce in Hennepin County in cases involving kids now takes 5.6 months. That's about a month faster than the rest of the state. This year, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government cited Hennepin county's early neutral evaluation program as one of the top 50 innovations in government.

While courts have tried to improve what happens in the legal system, policy efforts haven't stopped there. Minnesota requires parents who disagree on custody to attend co-parenting classes. Hennepin County used to require a three-hour session for those kids who were stuck in the middle. In 2005, I visit one run by the Storefront Group, a nonprofit in Richfield. They group kids by age-- 6 to 8 year olds, 9 to 12-year-olds, and teenagers.

I want to see the 9 to 12-year-olds because that was the age I was when my parents split up. There were no divorce classes for kids then. When I go to Storefront, parents are dropping off their kids. They'll come back just for the final moments of the class. A girl named Lizzie bounds in with a big smile and her dad kids the instructors, I hope you can get her to talk. Lizzie's 10 with wavy, light brown hair and brown eyes. Her parents are getting divorced, and she's got a lot to say.

LIZZIE: Sometimes I ride my bike around our neighborhood and look for a little spot, and I like to sit in the grass and think about stuff that's going on like our divorcing. Yeah.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The kids are given workbooks. One page shows cartoon faces with different emotions-- sad, mad, worried, happy. The kids are asked to circle how they felt when they found out about their parents divorces and put boxes around how they feel about being in class today.

LIZZIE: I put circles around the sad faces because I felt sad when my mom and dad were going to get a divorce, and I put squares on some of the happy ones because I was happy that I was going to come here. I felt like this because I know somebody would help me get through this.

SASHA ASLANIAN: What feeling is that?

LIZZIE: Kind of happy-- actually, happy. And then I felt worried that I'd be the only girl here or not a lot of kids would like me.

SPEAKER: I've been this way for when we had a divorce because it's all right and kind of not all right because I miss my mom and sometimes my dad, and it's pretty hard.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Two Storefront instructors, Sean Neil and Rachel Gustin, gently lead the children through a discussion of feelings and how they're all normal and what to do if you feel angry. They emphasize, kids aren't responsible for adult problems.

SEAN NEIL: Is it ever really a kids fault that adults can't solve their problems?

ALL: No.

SEAN NEIL: Does that sound silly?

SPEAKER: That's what my dad said. He said that it's not your fault you're getting-- we're getting divorced or-- yeah.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But these fourth and fifth graders have had plenty of exposure to adult problems. The stories start to flow.

SPEAKER: My mom has a friend named brad, and we go over there a lot. And my mom doesn't want my dad to know, but I tell my dad anyways. And she says, don't tell dad that we were here today. But I still tell him because I think that he should know. Because they're still technically married.

SEAN NEIL: Yeah.

SPEAKER: Also, my dad, he knocked down our Christmas tree, and he broke a lamp and he broke the window, I think, a little bit, I think. And there was glass all over the floor, and my mom told me to be careful. And they just started fighting and stuff.

SASHA ASLANIAN: This kid seemed to know they're out of their depth dealing with unhappy parents, but they don't know what to do about it. Here's Lizzie's take.

LIZZIE: It's like when you watch a grown up movie, you don't want to know about this stuff.

SEAN NEIL: That's right.

LIZZIE: You probably want-- you'll probably say in your mind, I don't want to learn about this stuff until I'm a grown up.

SEAN NEIL: Mhm.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Haley, the girl sitting next to Lizzie, nods in agreement.

LIZZIE: That's why they have different TV shows like cartoons.

SEAN NEIL: That's right.

SASHA ASLANIAN: The group practices role playing. They learn about different divorce traps kids can fall into, like playing messenger or spy. Annika volunteers to be the child in the poison game. Her pretend parents fill her ears with poisonous words about each other.

SEAN NEIL: How does it feel to be a child--

ANNIKA: I'm scared.

SEAN NEIL: --to people who are mean to each other? You're scared?

ANNIKA: Yeah.

SEAN NEIL: What do you think you could do when you feel like your parents--

ANNIKA: I'll tell both of them secrets about getting back together.

SEAN NEIL: Well--

SASHA ASLANIAN: Whoops, not quite. Annika has responded to the poison game with a game of her own, trying to parent trap her folks back together. The instructor suggests a different strategy, that she be honest and say it hurts her feelings when her parents say bad things about each other. The final game is the substitute when a parent treats a kid like another adult, maybe leaning on them too much for support, which is a confusing role for a kid. Now the kids are ready for their final exercise. They write a joint letter to their parents that the instructor will read aloud at the end of the class.

SEAN NEIL: We're going to bring your parents in now. Just stay seated where you're at, and then your parents--

SASHA ASLANIAN: The parents take their places behind their sons and daughters. Sean, the instructor, reads the letter.

SEAN NEIL: When you told me about the divorce, I felt mad, scared, ashamed, disappointed, sad--

SASHA ASLANIAN: The parents' faces remain blank. One dad drinks a coke. I'd been expecting this to be the most emotional part of the class. Instead, it feels vacant. In 2008, Hennepin County stopped requiring these classes, citing a lack of money to enforce the mandate and a reluctance to intrude on family privacy. Once the classes weren't required anymore, enrollment dwindled and the nonprofits were forced to cancel them. There's not a lot of good data on how well these classes work for kids anyway.

I wondered if what the kids learned in three hours would stick with them, or was it like passing out paper tents to people in a thunderstorm? Over the next three years, I try to follow the kids I met in this class. Nearly all their families have moved, have different phone numbers, or they don't respond. The only family that welcomes me back is Lizzie's. Only now that she's 12, she goes by Ellie. I go visit her at her dad's house in Bloomington. So your family has changed a lot in three years.

ELLIE: Oh, yes, a lot. I have three brothers and a new step mom. She's amazing, most of the time at least. She's really nice when she's not being a neat freak. But yeah, it's pretty good.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Ellie's pretty typical of a divorced kid. Not too many years have passed, but she and her brother Ben have gained a step mom, a step brother also named Ben, and now Daniel, a half brother who is a year and a half old when I visit. It's a lively household with a white pet rat named Sugar in a cage in the living room and a big trampoline out back. Two weekends a month and Tuesday evenings, Ellie and her first brother, Ben, spend time with their mom. Ellie seems chipper about life in both households. I ask her what she remembers about the divorce class.

ELLIE: I remember doing a lot of activities, and the teacher was really funny. I mean, he would tell us that it's all your fault, and then he would be like, just kidding, and stuff like that. Something that usually I learn in class goes through one ear and out the other. But I remember mostly about drawing pictures and telling the teacher what we think about our parents and how they yell and stuff. So yeah.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Ellie says it felt good to meet the other kids at Storefront and talk about their experiences, even if she never saw them again. The class is a positive, if hazy memory for Ellie. In that class, Ellie had described divorce as watching a grown up movie she wasn't old enough to understand. She says that movie is still playing in her head, only now with a slightly different cast.

ELLIE: My stepmom and my dad were actually fighting, and I just felt like, is this a rewinding movie? Like, did it rewind? I mean, it felt exactly how my parents fought.

SASHA ASLANIAN: A year later, I make one last visit so I can interview Ellie's parents. Ellie is now 13, and she goes by Liz. It's a Sunday morning, and her mom drops by so I can interview her mom, dad, and stepmom altogether. Liz stretches out on the couch across the living room and offers her own commentary. The tone is comfortable. Her parents, Jim and Shelly, say they think things are much better for their kids now than they were four years ago when they divorced.

JIM: I knew it would be tough on them, but I also knew that it would be tougher if we hadn't. So in the end, I think it was better for us to do what we did. And we're better friends now than we were when we were married, without a doubt. And I think that's a good example for Elizabeth. So to see that you can be really good friends with somebody and you don't have to be married to them. So I think they handle it, I don't know. What do you think, Shelly?

SHELLEY: I think they did pretty good. I mean, yeah, we did try to keep the kids in mind as much as we could. I know for myself, I wasn't prepared really with the reaction because I probably wasn't even prepared with my own reaction.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Liz's mom, dad, and stepmom say they're in touch on a daily basis to talk about the kids and to present a united front. Shelly says she's grateful to Jim's new wife, Carrie, for doing what's best for her kids. Carrie says the friendly cooperation didn't happen overnight, but came about because everyone kept an open mind and was able to move beyond things that happened in the past. Liz's dad concedes there's pain and sadness that come with a blended family, but there are also more people to love the kids. Liz pipes up from across the room. That's probably the best line you've said all week.

Four years on, Liz is growing up inside what's known today as a good divorce. The adults in her life get along and work constructively for the sake of the kids. You can feel the relief in the room. The '70s divorce boom did offer some lessons on how to do divorce better. There are still plenty of ugly ones, but there are also more tools to help families.

There are websites where parents can log on and keep joint calendars. Their kids don't have to overhear long negotiating phone calls. Measuring how divorce affects kids has also gotten more refined. Back in the '70s, the measurements were rather crude. Kids of divorce were judged on whether they'd be more likely to drop out of school or do drugs. So kids who didn't show up in juvie or a shrink's office were probably fine, weren't they?

ELIZABETH MARQUARDT: Just because your parents divorced reasonably well and you turn out reasonably well doesn't mean the divorce was no big deal.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Elizabeth Marquardt is a child of divorce who now directs the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, a think tank in New York. Marquardt wanted to dig into the subtler effects of divorce on kids. She surveyed 1,500 adults. Half were children of divorce, half grew up in intact families. In 2005, she published Between Two Worlds, The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. Marquardt's key finding is children of divorce have an entirely different job than kids growing up in intact families.

ELIZABETH MARQUARDT: In a marriage, it's the parents job first, to make sense of their different worlds, their different beliefs and values and ways of living. It's a hard job. Anybody who's married will tell you that. It's a hard job to come together and be two different people and try to make-- become one couple and make one family. Some parents find that it's too big, it's too difficult, it's too unwieldy. They don't want to have that job anymore of making sense of their differences. They get divorced. But when they have a child, the job of making sense of the differences between their two worlds does not go away. Instead, it's handed to the child alone.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Marquardt cites statistics that 2/3 of divorces are breakups of so-called low conflict marriages, like her parents. The kids might not have known there was much trouble. You know, the we grew apart explanation. The question adults always wonder is, which is worse for the kids, getting divorced or staying in a loveless marriage? Marquardt has an impassioned response to that question.

ELIZABETH MARQUARDT: I'm not advocating for loveless marriages. I'm an adult. I understand the needs that we have as women and men to be intimately fulfilled. But it's also the case that marriage doesn't make us happy every day. No, marriage does. But your marriage does so much more than just serve as a vehicle for meeting individual adult needs. It makes one world for your child. And children will tell you that that means everything to them.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SASHA ASLANIAN: A few years ago, I was helping my mom clean out her basement. She handed me a box of unlabeled reel to reel tapes. She wasn't sure what was on them. I took them home and discovered one of them contained this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER: I, Paul Aslanian--

PAUL ASLANIAN: I, Paul Aslanian--

SPEAKER: --take thee, Solfrid Gladstein--

PAUL ASLANIAN: --take thee, Solfrid Gladstein--

SPEAKER: --to my wedded wife--

PAUL ASLANIAN: --to my wedded wife--

SPEAKER: --to have and to hold--

PAUL ASLANIAN: --to have and to hold--

SASHA ASLANIAN: It's pretty overwhelming for a divorced kid to hear your parents doing this. Their voices sound so young, and it's such an idealistic moment. I decided to make a CD and play it for them as a surprise. They were dating each other again, so it's not quite as bad an idea as you're thinking. I have something I want to play for you guys and, and I need your help on this. Who are these people, OK?

SPEAKER: A home built on Jesus Christ, the solid foundation--

PAUL ASLANIAN: This is from our marriage.

SPEAKER: --the walls of prayer, covered by love like that which God has had for us.

SOLFRID GLADSTEIN: It is. This bastard [INAUDIBLE].

PAUL ASLANIAN: Yeah.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Right out of the chute. It's a disaster. I had underestimated the emotional wallop of hearing this again. It makes my mom cry. My dad starts cracking jokes to help her regain her equilibrium.

PAUL ASLANIAN: She was only 11. Listen to that voice.

SASHA ASLANIAN: My parents' marriage blew up at a time in the late '70s when a lot of families were falling apart.

PAUL ASLANIAN: Somehow, that contract, that sacred contract that we entered into--

SOLFRID GLADSTEIN: For me to be a slave? [LAUGHS]

PAUL ASLANIAN: Yeah.

SOLFRID GLADSTEIN: [LAUGHS]

PAUL ASLANIAN: Yeah. --was abrogated.

SOLFRID GLADSTEIN: Paul, don't make yourself worse than you really were.

SASHA ASLANIAN: We can laugh about things now. And there were funny parts, like dad telling telemarketers who asked for mom that she ran away just to see how they'd react. My brother Joel and I still laugh at our dad's bad cooking, macaroni and cheese for a year straight. And how he stored a canoe in the living room and rebuilt his favorite British motorcycle in our dining room. It's harder to acknowledge the pain, theirs and ours. My mom brings it up.

SOLFRID GLADSTEIN: I think it's been very hard on them, very hard on them. That makes me feel bad.

PAUL ASLANIAN: I don't think so. I doubt very much if either you or Joel ever went to sleep at night worried about whether or not you had a dad or a mom who loved you.

SOLFRID GLADSTEIN: But you did go to sleep at night worrying about how it could be better, and then it was painful, I'm sure.

SASHA ASLANIAN: She's right. I knew my parents loved me, and it still hurt. And I knew I didn't ever want to go through that again. When I recorded my friends at book group, we talked a lot about our mothers and the example they set for us. Marriage didn't look that appealing to me.

SPEAKER: You guys know it took 12 years of dating for me to make it to the altar.

SASHA ASLANIAN: But I truly could not see the point. I remember when you got married, and I remember thinking, why?

SPEAKER: That was the first word out of your mouth when I told you I was getting married, was, why? Seriously.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Yeah. I don't know why I couldn't-- I think I didn't associate it with any upside.

SPEAKER: Yeah.

SASHA ASLANIAN: Yeah, that must have been it. But I eventually did see the upside. I decided to trust the happiness I felt. I booked the church. I even tempted fate and wore my mother's wedding dress. I was 31. She had been 19. I wanted to be absolutely sure of what I was doing. Growing up, I thought I turned out fine. After the divorce. I looked good on paper. But inside, I held myself back, afraid of breaking my own kids hearts some day.

Each year, about a million kids in America experienced their parents' divorce. 1979 was the high water mark, but the record didn't hold for long. 1981 saw the same divorce rate. It's been falling since then, but that probably has more to do with couples deciding not to get married in the first place. I worked on this program for five years.

At first I thought it would be a show about how divorced kids aren't all messed up. But the more I read and the more interviews I did, the more I became convinced that the real story is how deep this stuff cuts. Sure, divorced kids can be successful in life and relationships, but the past stays with us as a cautionary tale. Still, I've decided, I still believe in love, even for divorced kids.

[ORANGE JUICE, "L.O.V.E. LOVE"]

(SINGING) I started to write the song about you, [INAUDIBLE]

SASHA ASLANIAN: Divorced kid was edited by Katherine Winter of American Radioworks and Mike Edgerly of NPR News. It was mixed by Johnny Vince Evans. Producer Kate Ellis recorded the Fair Weather Street School interviews. A five year parade of interns helped with research, including Bente Birkeland, Kelly Carswell, Elizabeth Tannen, Joel Gross Steven, Nate Hall, and Nancy Rosenbaum. Mel Summer produced the website at mprnews.org. I'm Sasha Aslanian.

(SINGING) L-O-V-E, love. Love is a walk down Main Street.

Love.

Love is an [INAUDIBLE].

Love.

Love is something that can't be beat.

L-O-V-E strange to me. I can't. This feeling.

GARY EICHTEN: Well, that does it for our midday program today. Gary Eichten here. I'd like to thank you for tuning in. And, again, remind you that the documentary will be archived on our website, mprnewsq.org. If you'd like to listen a second time, mprnewsq.org. Reminder, coming up right after the news, special edition of talk of the nation, taking a look at the life and times of Edward Kennedy, who has passed away. Also, a special program about Senator Kennedy at 9:00 tonight here on Minnesota Public Radio News.

Tomorrow, we'll be out at the State Fair, first day of the fair. We sure hope you'll be able to come by. 11 o'clock. We'll be talking with Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. And then at noon, meteorologist climatologist Mark Seeley will be on hand with his annual State Fair weather quiz. All of that tomorrow out at the fair, hope you can come out.

SPEAKER: Programming is supported by the College of Saint Scholastica, offering a suite of online health care degree programs, including RN to BS in nursing, undergraduate and graduate level health information management, and a transitional doctor of physical therapy degree.

SPEAKER: Support for this program comes from Gortons Tree Event. Gortons, growers of evergreen and shade trees, and offering the reminder that fall is the time to plant a tree. Gortons in Inver Grove, it's only natural to buy from the grower.

CARRIE MILLER: I'm Carrie Miller, and we're celebrating our 10th season of Talking Volumes with a blockbuster lineup. Stephen King, Barbara Kingsolver, and La Confidential writer James Ellroy. Tickets are on sale now. Buy a season package, which is buy three and get the fourth show free. Dates and details on the mid-morning book page or go to the Fitzgerald Box Office website. Talking Volumes is a partnership between the Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio with collaboration from the loft literary center.