Divorce in America

The experience of the boy in "Station" dividing time between divorced parents has become increasingly familiar to American children during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The divorce level first began to rise in the 1960s and continued to rise even more sharply in the 1970s. In 1975 projections from statistics supplied by the Current Population Survey suggested that about one-third of married people between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five would end their first marriage in divorce. By 1996 this figure had in fact been exceeded, with 40 percent of people in that category then divorced. The divorce rate peaked in 1979 and 1981, when 5.3 per every 1,000 couples were divorced. The figure dropped somewhat to 4.7 per every 1,000 couples in 1989 and 1990. In 1990, 16.8 per every 1,000 children under the age of eighteen were affected by divorce.

The rising divorce rate produced new challenges for the courts, which had to decide which...