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Baby boomers’ divorces affect their grown children

By: Susan Pierce
(Contact)

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Makayla Bumgarner

Eddie Grant says although his parents divorced when he was 4 years old, a repressed fear of abandonment more than 20 years later made him hesitant to commit to marriage.

“Robin and I have been together 19 years, married 10 of them. I definitely believe my parents’ divorce had an effect on me, so I was very hesitant to finally marry,” Mr. Grant said.

Adult children of divorced parents may say they’re just fine now, but studies show lingering effects of their parents’ marriages can manifest themselves years later.

Forty percent of Americans ages 18 to 40 are children of divorced parents. Fear of commitment, depression, low self-esteem and a tendency to tolerate or show abuse are consistent traits manifesting themselves in their relationships.

“These are children of baby boomers, whose divorce rate was one of every two marriages,” said Dr. Beverly Reynolds Rodgers, a former resident of East Ridge. “Divorces of the 1970s and 1980s taught ‘Children are resilient, they’ll get over it.’ But they won’t without being aware of the effects of their parents.”

Dr. Rodgers and her husband, Dr. Tom Rodgers, counselors with the Institute for Soul-Healing Love in Charlotte, N.C., will be in town Oct. 3-4 to lead “Forgiving, Forgetting and Moving On.”

Dr. Rodgers said they developed this workshop while counseling children of baby boomers.

“They would come in and have problems such as a terrible fear of doom, paranoia that their mates would cheat, long engagements where they couldn’t decide whether to marry. We’d find it was rooted in the splitting up of their own families.”

Julie Baumgardner, director of First Things First, said the lingering effects of boomers’ divorces are a relatively new social issue concerning Generation X.

“It’s become a hot topic because we’ve realized there are serious issues here,” she said.

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