What a relief. Here I've been beating my head against a wall out of guilt and shame over completely ruining my kids' lives, subjecting them to the Pain of Living in a Broken Home, and it turns out I don't have to any more. I can hold my head up as a productive member of society again, me and all the other divorced parents out there, because a new study says we're just as good as married parents.

So there. Nyah.

Seriously, this goes against conventional wisdon, but who am I to doubt the veractity of MSNBC? 

It turns out that a whole bunch of data was collected as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NSLCY) in 1994 and 1996, which followed about 5,000 Canadian children living in two-parent households as of 1994 and compared changes in parenting among the 200 households with subsequent divorces and those that remained intact. And what they found was that by and large, parenting practices remained about the same after the divorce as they were before it. In other words, nurturing parents remained nurturing. (Obviously the flip side was true as well, but let's not dwell on the suckiness of parents, even a minority of them)

Parents answered survey questions in three areas, nurturing, consistency, and punishment, and from there the data was evaluated by sociologists at the University of Alberta.

Now, I see a couple of potential problems with this, as overjoyed as I am to know that I no longer suck:

1. How honest are parents in assessing their own parenting practices? We think our fat kids weigh less than they do; are we seeing ourselves clearly?

2. We're only talking 200 divorced households here, which, to me, represents far to small a sample to be very meaningful. 

Oh well. Did I really need a study to tell me I don't suck as a parent? 

Photo: custodyanddivorce.com