I’ve been aware of many of these statistics for a while, and because of that I secretly hoped all my children would marry people whose parents had stable and happy marriages, thus improving the odds of my kids’ marriages being stable. But that isn’t happening–our older son married a woman whose parents divorced when she was very young, and our younger son is soon to marry a women whose parents have just recently divorced. And from seeing what is going on with our soon-to-be daughter-in-law, it jibes closely with what one of your links pointed out: “Divorce seems to be the most traumatic on those children whose parents were not in a high-conflict marriage. The divorce catches them totally by surprise.”

I’m a bit puzzled by your statement:
“In fact, statistics indicate that half of all marriages end in divorce and the chances for divorce increase based on the length of time married, among other factors”

Did you mix up something, or am I missing something? The article linked to in your second paragraph says: “The risk of divorce gets less the longer a marriage has survived.”

“A survey-based life table study of the net risk of
divorce for 15- to 44-year-old women in 1995 found that the
proportion of first marriages having ended in divorce was 20
percent five years after marriage, 33 percent after ten
years, and 43 percent after fifteen years. Since the risk of
divorce in the next year gets less the longer a marriage has
survived, the fact that the rate was 43 percent within 15
years suggests that the 50 percent figure is roughly correct
for the total life span of recent cohorts. For second
marriages the likelihood of divorce was higher, already
reaching 39 percent after ten years of marriage.”

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I also think that it is important to remember that odds are just odds when it comes to if a future spouses parents were divorced. The best way for a newly married Christian couple to decrease the odds that they will end up divorced is to follow God’s plan for marriage. That being said, it is also important for a child whose parents are divorced to consider communication patterns or other habits that led to the breakdown of their own parents marriage. I know that I personally, have had to examine and change the way that I react to some things because of the problems my own parents had that I absorbed as a child. I suppose that is true of anyone whether their parents divorced or not.

I do not mean to doom any given marriage to divorce, and I completely agree in the strength of God’s redemption.

I’m just calling to mind the experiences I’ve seen over the years where a child repeats the sins of his parents, many times without thinking. Just like Sadie said, it is good for all of us, and especially children of divorce, to examine the bad habits or bad attitudes that our parents gave us. The long arms of our parents hold us long after we have separated from them. And not always in a good way.

For instance, I am about 100 years old, and I swore I would never be like my mother. And yet, when I’m willing to admit it, I have to say that I am just like my mother in some negative ways. And guess what? I have a daughter, too.

If any good comes of this blog, it might be that some day in the future when someone is angry with their spouse or they are having temptation to turn away from their vows, they will be able identify and stop those “little foxes”–whether they originated from one’s parents or not–before the damage grows.