Since 1975, more than one million children each year have seen their parents divorce—a number that sharply contrasts with the 480,000 children affected by marital breakup in 1960. Although the number of divorcing couples began to decrease after 1980, many social scientists and family therapists have become increasingly concerned about the potentially harmful effects of divorce on such large numbers of children.

Many researchers, such as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, a former research associate at the Institute for American Values, maintain that children of divorce often suffer long-term damage. According to the information Whitehead gathered from several recent studies on children and divorce, one-third of the surveyed children suffered from depression, emotional insecurity, and school underachievement more than five years after their parents' divorce. In addition, she asserts, children of divorce are more likely to drop out of school, commit crimes, abuse drugs, suffer from physical or sexual...