She gets letters.....

Another email this morning from Diane Sollee of smartmarriages.com about Elizabeth Marquardt. The highlighted/colored sections were done by this writer, not by Diane. I also added hyperlinks where needed. (And I have the referenced NY Times stories/letters if anyone cannot read them online).


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- MARQUARDT VS. AHRONS
Elizabeth Marquardt, author of Between Two Worlds will debate Constance
Ahrons, author of The Good Divorce, on Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN tonight.
The show airs 9-11 pm Eastern time. Please forward this to your lists.

If you haven't bought the Marquardt book by now, hope you realize you should
do so. You need to bone up. Buy it now and get Elizabeth to sign it in
Atlanta. It's only $16.47 on amazon. To order, click:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0307237109/smartmarriages

(For more information on her book, and about Elizabeth, see here added by WICatholic)

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- BETWEEN-TWO-WORLDS LETTERS TO ED OF NEW YORK TIMES

This morning's 700 Club feature on Between Two Worlds was great -- featured
Marquardt and several adult children of divorce including Jeff Williams.
Here is Elizabeth's post this morning on the Family Scholars Blog about NY
Times Letters to Editor department. While it's true that the editors get to
select letters according to their bias, it is still vitally important that
you write letters. And, tonight after Anderson Cooper, get on their website
and send emails. - diane

The New York Times ran five letters to the editor today
(http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/opinion/l08divorce.html) in response to
the story on Saturday about the new study of children of divorce reported in
my book, Between Two Worlds.

All five letters are critical. I'm not at all surprised by criticism -- in
fact, I welcome it -- but I am shocked they did not see fit to run at least
one positive letter.

Why do I suspect they got at least a few?

Because my op-ed the next day in the Washington Post (whose readers may be
only slightly less liberal than the Times' readers, but only slightly) has
generated, so far, 160 emails to me from readers. Fully 3/4 are
overwhelmingly positive, the rest are critical. I know an op-ed is a little
different from a news story, but the subject is the same, and I'll bet there
were at least a few Times readers like those many Post readers I heard from
-- grown children of divorce, agonized divorced parents, married parents who
chose to stick it out in troubled marriages and are glad they did,
grandparents worried about their grandchildren, and many professionals
including a pediatrician, attorneys, two kindergarten teachers, several
therapists, and a divorce mediator -- who all wrote to tell me that I was
right, with a number of them saying something along the lines of 'thank God
someone is willing to tell the truth.'

Maybe they're planning on running the others tomorrow :)

In the meantime, about the letters they ran:

In the otherwise excellent news article, there wasn't space to capture every
nuance of the study and I think that some letter writers as a result might
have formed a wrong impression.

Most of the letter writers assume that I believe it's better for children to
be stuck in abusive families rather than experience divorce. Nothing is
further from the truth, not in the data I have, nor in my opinion. In the
study we compared grown children of 'good' and 'bad' divorces with those
from three types of marriages: unhappy but low conflict marriages, unhappy
and high conflict marriages, and happy marriages. Grown children of 'good'
divorces fared worse on many indicators than those from unhappy, low
conflict marriages ­ and two-thirds of divorces end low-conflict marriages.

Second, one letter raises the problem that perhaps those who divorced had
parenting skills problems that would have been apparent even if they had not
divorced, which is possible. Without being able to randomly assign people to
divorced or intact families we'll never be able to definitively 'prove' that
divorce is the cause of any problem. Every social scientist struggles with
this dilemma. But we did several things to tackle that problem, including
looking at the level of parental conflict (a significant parenting skills
area) reported by the grown children of divorce. It turns out only 1/5 say
their parents had 'a lot' of conflict after the divorce yet a great number
of them reported much higher rates of problems than those from intact
families.

In short: We found that children of 'good' divorces fare worse on many
indicators than those from unhappy marriages, so long as that marriage was
low conflict, as most are that end in divorce.

Anyway, I welcome criticism. I also welcome the flood of positive letters
I'm receiving from grown children of divorce and concerned professionals who
see this happening to children every day. I'm sorry the Times did not see
fit to publish even one letter like that.

- Elizabeth Marquardt
http://www.betweentwoworlds.org/
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