By Susan Brinkmann, OCDS
Staff Journalist
The country’s teetering economy points to the need for reform on many levels, including the breakdown of the family, experts say, which can cost taxpayers up to $112 billion a year.
The Washington Times is reporting that divorce-reform advocate Chris Gersten, founder and chairman of the non-partisan Coalition for Divorce Reform thinks the time is ripe to create laws that will make divorce harder and reconciliation easier for struggling couples in order to improve the national bottom line.
What most people don’t realize is that the average divorce costs a couple $2,500. But most divorces result in the creation of new single-parent family with children, which costs the government anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 a year. That amounts to $33 billion to $112 billion a year in divorce-related social-service subsidies and lost revenue.
Gersten’s group has created a legislative model that aims at cutting divorce rates by a third in five years, which results in a dramatic savings to taxpayers, he says.
Forty years of easy no-fault divorce have made the formation, dissolution, and reformation of marriage so acceptable in American society that it has caused “a coming and going of partners on a scale seen nowhere else,” said Andrew J. Cherlin said in his 2009 book, The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today.
But easy divorce is not what Americans want. Polling has consistently revealed that when asked the question if divorce should be easier or more difficult to obtain, the most popular answer is always “more difficult.”
And for good reason. No-fault divorce has caused divorce rates to skyrocket. Consider the most recent case of the state of New York, which was, up until last year, the only state that required a “grounds” trial rather than the much speedier “no-fault” divorce that does not require the assigning of fault. In the first seven months after a no-fault divorce law went into effect, the divorce rate jumped 12 percent.
These numbers translate into a staggerinly high national divorce rate. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), a total of 1,087,920 divorces occurred in 2008, which is amounted to the unacceptably high rate of 8.2 per 1,000 population.
The numbers don’t lie, and divorce damages the economy almost as much as it ruins lives, particularly that of children.
For instance, the Times cites a 2009 paper by W. Bradford Wilcox which found that if the U.S. “enjoyed the same level of family stability today as it did in 1960,” there would be 750,000 fewer children repeating grades, 1.2 million fewer school suspensions, about 500,000 fewer acts of teenage delinquency, about 600,000 few children receiving therapy and 70,000 fewer suicides every year.
Even more concerning is a new study by Howard Fiedman and Leslie Martin that compared children whose parents divorced to those who stayed together and found that the children of divorced parents had shorter life spans by an average of five years.
That longevity data is “the most devastating analysis that we’ve seen … of the impact of divorce on children,” Gersten said. “They don’t ‘get over it’.”
But if reform took place, what would it look like?
Gersten sites the introduction of the Parental Divorce Reduction Act in New Mexico this year, which requires parents of minor children who are contemplating divorce to first attend six hours of “divorce-reduction” education. They would then enter an eight-month “reflection” period with access to marriage-strengthening materials and workshops. After that, they can go ahead with a divorce, “and we let the lawyers take over,” Gersten told the Times, adding that couples in certain circumstances, such as domestic violence, would be exempted from the program.
The good news is that he expects lawmakers in a dozen states to introduce similar legislation in 2012.
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