People don’t want to hear about these deep pains of the children of divorce because they are too busy coaching them how to think about it. Allan Bloom writes in his book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” that children of divorce have been “told how to feel and what to think about themselves by psychologists who are paid by their parents to make everything work out as painlessly as possible for the parents, as part of no-fault divorce.”

“Meanwhile, psychologists provide much of the ideology justifying divorce — e.g., that it is worse for kids to stay in stressful homes (thus motivating the potential escapees — that is, the parents — to make it as unpleasant as possible there),” he adds. “Psychologists are the sworn enemies of guilt. And they have an artificial language for the artificial feeling with which they equip children.”

And this is why a casual approach to divorce is so harmful. We are trying to condition people, including the children of divorced parents, to believe that if we eliminate the bitter court hearings or fights at a child’s ballgame from divorce, then it is good. But we must allow the children of divorce to hurt.