Generation gap

Writing in the London Times Online, Daisy Goodwin recalls her childhood...

In one house we drank coffee, went to bed at eight sharp and always had clean socks; at the other we drank tea, put ourselves to bed when we felt like it and had bare feet. In one house the bed was always made, in the other it was a mass of rumpled sheets with sand at the bottom. Capital radio was forbidden in one house, Elvis was compulsory in the other.

...and how it has affected her:

The circumstances of my childhood have made me adaptable, resourceful and emotionally intelligent, true, but I am also needy, insecure and unable to set boundaries. I have been clinically depressed.

However, the one thing I am not is divorced, because I know what divorce means. And the latest statistics suggest that I am not alone in this awareness.

She goes on to state that the biggest drop in divorce rates in the U.K. is in the generation that grew up as children of divorce.

Having been through one divorce, the children of broken homes have no desire to go through another. They realise, because their parents didn’t, that in Margaret Atwood’s words, “a divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there’s less of you”.