Divorce Urban Legend

Have you ever heard that, eating carrots improves night vision, a duck’s quack doesn’t echo, mixing Pop Rocks and Soda can cause an intestinal implosion, chocolate causes acne, or if you swallow chewing gum, it remains inside your body for seven years?

These are a few examples of the thousands of silly myths that are floating around. Here is another one you may have heard that isn’t so silly. Fifty percent of marriages end in divorce. I can remember hearing that statistic from some mystery source and thinking, wow, half of the married people I know are going to divorce. The truth is that the 50-50 statistics are really more of a prophecy than accuracy. One that I refuse to receive in my church and city. It’s a misrepresentation of the numbers. For example, one year it may show that one million people were divorced in American last year and two million people got married. At first glace this may seem like fifty percent, but you have to take in account the fifty million already existing marriages.

The real numbers show that more like 35% of marriages end in divorce. Lower, but not low enough. Especially when you consider what divorce does to our children. Forty years ago, ninety percent of children were raised by their married, natural parents. Today, that figure is 68 percent. More than one in four children are living in a sole-parent family or step/blended family from which one natural parent is absent, mostly the father.


Look at these true stats:

• Children of divorce (whose parents divorced while they were children) are 62% more likely than children of non-divorced parents to no longer identify with the faith of their parents when they grow up.

• Rates of child abuse are eight to 10 times higher in step/blended and sole-parent families than in natural, two-parent families.

A recent study showed that:

As the number of family disadvantages increases, the likelihood of a young teen having sex increases correspondingly.

Among females, 7% of those with no family disadvantages first had sex with older individuals when they were 15 years old or younger, 12% with one disadvantage, 20% with two disadvantages, and 23% with all three disadvantages.

(Family disadvantages include low parent education, family structure other than two biological parents and being born to a teen mother)

-Source: National Survey of Family Growth 2002.