Karl Zinsmeister

About the author: Karl Zinsmeister is editor in chief of the American Enterprise, a conservative journal of opinion.

When parents divorce, the children's relationships with their parents change dramatically. Most children of divorce stay with their mother, who becomes both the nurturer and the disciplinarian. Many children see their fathers less frequently after the divorce. These changes lead to poor educational performance, truancy, criminal activity, and psychological problems for the children of divorce.

Originally, notes family historian John Sommerville, marriage arose to create "security for the children to be expected from the union." Yet nowadays "the child's interest in the permanence of marriage is almost ignored." During the divorce boom that began in the mid-1960s, divorces affecting children went up even faster than divorces generally, and today most crack-ups involve kids. Since 1972, more than a million youngsters have been...