The statistics point in one direction but once you start talking to people about their parents’ divorces

The statistics point in one direction, but once you start talking to people about their parents’ divorces, the picture becomes much less clear. Situations that bald statistical evidence interprets as “disadvantage” may be seen differently by those who experience them.Against the current flow of expert opinion, many grown-up children of divorce say that they were well aware of their parents’ unhappiness, and were relieved when the tension at home was eased.”The stuff about long-term damage is garbage,” says Susanne Parker, now 31, in a long-term relationship and mother of a two-year-old son “My parents split up when I was 13 and my brother was eight. This would seem to prove conclusively that “good divorces” are rare. When, earlier this year, the National Family Mediation group dared to suggest that if divorce is handled sensitively, children can deal with it well, they were condemned in the press as “contemptible” by other groups who did not agree.
The latest survey follows more than 11,400 children born in 1958, and finds that children of divorced parents do less well economically and socially. Since then, the Centre for Family Research at Cambridge University and the Institute of Economic Affairs have weighed in with similar findings. This report found that constant fighting between parents had less adverse effects than parental separation.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation was among the first to challenge the idea that a “good divorce” is better for the family than a bad marriage, in a 1994 survey which was also one of the first to concentrate on the effects of divorce from the child’s viewpoint. She’s Meryl Streep doing Babs Windsor, and her fame looks set to continue in its oddball, knickers-off, classy classic mode, dodging between obscurity and stardom Amanda who? Oh, her.. “Divorce wrecks life down the years,” thundered the Daily Mail last week, under the headline “How the misery of divorce lasts for generations”, as another report on the effects of parental separation on children was published. Since researchers first began to investigate the effects of divorce, the theory that, under any circumstances, it is damaging to children has been rapidly gaining ground. She was suddenly there, swanning around starkers, writhing in mud on a desert island with Oliver Reed in lame Nic Roeg film Castaway.

Two years later, she still had her clothes off as the seductive snake woman in Ken Russell’s The Lair of the White Worm Amanda then played a bisexual on LA Law for two years. Such role-play marked a career that might otherwise have fetched up in Stratford, Emmerdale or some other English actress stable. People “think I’m this sort of wild, go-for-anything creature,” Amanda helpfully explains.Boys On The Side: Our heroine does not seem to sport as big a love life as her choice of roles might suggest No husband, no offspring. But she has dated Mr Adam Ant, as well as the fabulously vain filmmaker Nick Broomfield – the one who pursues the likes of Heidi Fleiss for his Nick- on-every-wall documentaries.Fame Prospects: Amanda comes and goes in the public consciousness – an international success story whose profile is strangely vague She will co-star with Kelsey Grammer in a comedy next year Her Wallis is inspiring serious attention. Raven-haired intellectual, platinum-locked temptress: she changes her hair colour as easily as her accents.
Role Models: Like Liz Hurley, vaguely posh English with American overtones, she simply seemed to appear.