Cassie DenHaese's mother's divorce worked out so well for her, Cassie is already thinking about her own, in case she ever needs one. DenHaese, now 15, was 11/2 when her father left, and she's seen him only twice since. "The cons? I don't think there really are any," she says. A man her mother dated for four years "is still like a father to me," even though her mother has a new boyfriend; group activities with Parents Without Partners stood in for an extended family. Cassie's mother, Becky Medicus--a staff training officer for the U.S. Army Reserves--found that single parenthood worked better than the alternative: "I didn't have to worry about whether my husband agreed. I made the rules, and the rules stood." Compared with the trauma of her teenage friends whose parents are going through their first divorces, DenHaese thinks she's got the better deal: even though she believes "very firmly in the whole marriage-family thing... if I was going to have a divorce, I'd have it when my kids were younger."
DenHaese's tale illustrates at least two important truths about the continuing evolution of American families: the resilience kids bring to their lives, and the powerful hold the "whole marriage-family thing" still exerts on their expectations. "All different kinds of structures work for kids, as long as there's love, adequate supervision, structure and consistency," says Barbara Howard, a pediatrician at Johns Hopkins. But those are four big requirements; not all "nontraditional" families can meet them. And, says child psychiatrist Elizabeth Berger, there is no escaping the "psychological reality of something in every child's heart that wants to say, 'Mommy, Daddy, me'."
Until recently, the dysfunctionality of nontraditional families was a self-fulfilling assumption; children without a biological mother and father were stigmatized and shunned. Now, in all but the most conservative milieus, that is no longer true. Still, to state the obvious, two parents are better than one by reason of simple logistics (although many parents would add that even two is a ridiculously inadequate number). "It pays to have two committed, able-bodied parents popping out of bed in the morning," says Berger. "Then one relieves the other."
Money, relatives and sheer effort can help substitute for the missing spouse. But they are of less value in providing the stability that children need even more than another person to drive them to ballet class. On that basis, says Howard, the children of lesbian couples can fare as well as those of heterosexual couples; lesbian relationships tend to be very stable and long-lasting. Howard also believes that single women who choose to have babies, whether by donor insemination or adoption, generally make successful mothers. "They're determined," she reasons. "They've got the financial resources. They're not downtrodden or depressed because they've been abandoned."
In contrast, children of divorce often do feel abandoned, or, perhaps worse, responsible. "It is the nature of the childlike mind to believe the world revolves around them," says Berger. "They may think, 'If only I hadn't interrupted Daddy's nap'." But probably the most problematic situation for children is a series of relatively short-term relationships--a new man to call Daddy every few years. "We're much happier without a man in the house," says Janice Brooks, 41, a benefits manager in Houston, who lives with two daughters by two different men--one of whom she never married--and a 2-year-old granddaughter. Her daughters' attitude toward her second husband, she recalls, was: "You're not my father, so you can't discipline me." Susan Brown, a sociologist at Bowling Green State University, has been studying cohabiting families in terms of kids' behavior and emotional problems. "Generally, kids living with cohabiting parents are not doing too well," she says, compared with those whose parents are married. The gap widens above the age of 6, which Brown attributes to "the cumulative effects of family instability. The older they get, the less likely they are to be living with two biological parents anymore."
Children in cohabiting families may also be at higher risk of abuse from their mothers' boyfriends--although researchers are still debating the question. Jill Glick, medical director of child protective services at the University of Chicago, says that more than half the serious brain injuries her hospital sees in infants are inflicted by "paramour perpetrators"--men who lack the biological and emotional connection that inhibits parents from hurting their own children. Recognizing that children's health can be affected by the stresses of growing up in a single-parent family, or with a succession of stepparents or revolving-door boyfriends, the American Academy of Pediatrics is introducing the concept of "family pediatrics." "We're not saying pediatricians need to take care of all the problems," says Dr. Edward Schor, "but they should be identifying them."
But while these circumstances "may make it more difficult to have good outcomes for children," Schor admits "it's nowhere near impossible." It's reassuring to know that millions of children of divorced, never married or gay and lesbian parents can hope to lead happy and productive lives as adults--which, after all, is a goal that can elude the offspring of even the most conventional families. It may be, as Berger says, that every child yearns to be part of a triad of Mommy, Daddy and me. But then again, who do you think psychoanalysis was invented for?