The following paper critically analyzes whether divorce is a devastating act that reverberates down the decades, inflicting
permanent harm on adults and children or whether it is a healing act for the family torn by
conflicts that are far worse than any divorce might be. From the paper: " Wallerstein's research is anecdotal, limited to a homogeneous, affluent, Caucasian sample, and was not contrasted with a control group. She did not track similar
families torn by conflicts who nonetheless stayed together. Her work's most serious flaw, however, is her skewed sample: every family came to her because they were already experiencing serious problems. And thus her work has been criticized by some colleagues, because it does not take into account the complex tangle of emotions and difficulties that dysfunctional families suffer, whether they divorce or not."