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We seem to love rules and directions. Self-help is a billion dollar industry. It seems that everyone is looking for an expert to tell them how to live “right”. We trust others to be the experts in knowing what is best for us and our children, even when they have no direct knowledge of us.
This is true in regards to divorce, marital relationships, and parenting as well. There is a new book, The Longevity Project, that reports “parental divorce during childhood was the single strongest social predictor of early death, many years into the future”. In many ways this provocative statement is being used as newest rule to live and parent by. However, it is important to look at the study deeper.
Perhaps the actual rule that comes from this report is that divorce requires an even greater effort at positive parenting from both parents.
About The Longevity Project
In March 2011 Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin published The Longevity Project. This is an overview of their findings from a longitudinal study first started ninety years earlier in 1921.
In 1921, Stanford University psychologist Lewis Terman, Ph.D. asked local San Francisco elementary school teachers to identify ‘bright” and apparently healthy students to participate in a study. The participants were all born around 1910. Dr. Terman was interested in studying the sources of intellectual leadership and was hoping to identify signs of potential. The child participants included children, preselected by their teachers, whose measured IQ was 135 or above. As a result the child subjects consisted of students in the highest one percent (1%) of the school population in general intelligence.
When Dr. Terman died thirty-five years later, he left a significant collection of data from about the minute details of the lives and feelings of 1,528 people covering several decades of their lives. This data sample, it can be argued, is not representational of the country as a whole, or even California. However, it is a data sample unlike anything else that is available. In his quest to find indicators or predictors of intelligence, Dr. Terman collected information on all facets of his participants personal and family lives.
In 1990, researchers Friedman and Martin followed up on his data and traced the participants that were still alive and determined the time and cause of death of those that had passed away. The statistical analysis is enlightening, even if looked at as skewed or not representational of the population as a whole.
***It is important to note that although the book makes some specific statements, the authors do not provide any raw data or other numbers to support their findings. For example we do not know how many children of the study experienced parental divorce, nor how many of those children chose to continue to participate in the study as the years passed.
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Read Part 2, our analysis of the findings here: Parental Divorce & Effects On Children
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Additional Reading
- Parental Divorce & Child Health
- Argument For Mediation
- Divorce Mediation Involving Children
- How Is Divorce Supposed To Be Done
- Divorce Does Not Have To Be Tragedy
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Tags: children, divorce, Divorce Mediation, health, Parenting, statistics, the longevity project
