My brother and I were raised by a single mother.
My father died when we were 5 and 2 and my mother never re-married.There was very little money.
What about people like us?
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A fair question and the illustration of why this issue is ignored. The destructive nature of divorce is not universal, many of us (and yes my parents divorced) survive this horror.
The correlation of social harm to divorce is real, it is not total. Many of us victims of this evil survive and do well. But, some, a minority perhaps, gravitate towards evil. Holloweird and the porn industry recruit almost exclusively from our demographic cohort, as does organized crime. Why?
People like you know their parents love/loved each other.
The issue for kids is do their parents love each other, they just don’t have the vocabulary to express it. Actually, I recall and believe one study which showed that adult children take the divorce of their parents later in life, that is when the parents divorce after the kids are grown, the kids take it much worse.
Divorced parents can do their best by focusing on the kids’ lack of an intact marriage of their parents, by, well, admitting that that’s the problem.
Kids do well when the parent they live with respects family life, marriage and surrounds the children/ family with healthy families and marriages so the kids at least can have a role model for themselves and not dwell.
All of that is taken care of in a case of widowhood, a relatively natural occurence.
Humble opinion based on observation.
Mears, I argue that your case is different because you probably still had the influence of your father in your household under those circumstances. Without knowing you personally, and assuming you are normal, that’s my assertion.
“My father died when we were 5 and 2 and my mother never re-married.There was very little money.”
You did not have the very real issues that divorce brings. Yes you had a great trauma, but it was not one that would lead you and your siblings to blame yourself. Divorce is a particularly nasty and evil trauma. Poverty and the loss of a parent are also very real traumas, but they are different from that of divorce.
I have heard of a study that showed that children raised by a single parent due to the death of the other parent statistically turn about the same as do kids who grow up in a home with both parents. In my cases as best I remember both parents were still living.
What about people like us?
Interesting is the fact that widows are the only group of single mothers to raise their kids as well as a two-parent family. There must be something powerful about the memory of the father and the fact that the father's side of the family is not estranged from the mother.
Irrelevant.