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Comment by brightball | Hacker News Reader

There could be a lot of contributors to that. A child of a widow will deal with grief but hopefully move forward together as a family. Potentially even trying to honor their fathers memory in the process.

A child of a divorce is likely to deal with anger, instability from custody agreements, custody battles, emotional fights and manipulation between parents, new relationships on both sides and the changes that come with that including issues with step siblings.

Divorce comes with so many negatives for children. A “healthy” divorce is rare from what I’ve seen to this point in my life.

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It's self-selecting. If the relationship was not in a healthy state to begin with, divorce doesn't fix that dysfunction. It's full admission the relationship between two people isn't something both parties can come together and resolve. The fact that there are any "healthy" divorces amazes me.

We can easily see the population of divorced families, it's much harder for us to shine a light on "should be divorced but aren't". I have a hard time believing kids with a dysfunctional parent relationship at home would be better off.

The difference will always be that in a divorce, at least one parent left voluntarily and for a widow that was not the case.

For the kids, they’ll feel this for the rest of their lives regardless of any other circumstances.

I think it's probably a bit of both and a bit different for each family. Divorce as an indicator of dysfunctional family dynamics that lead to bad outcomes on the one hand, and conflict post divorce that demoralizes the growing people in the family on the other. I'm a child of divorce and I'll say that I probably wouldn't have turned out better if my parents had stayed together forcefully, just different. They're damaged people, they had a dysfunctional relationship, and it would've affected me negatively. At the same time, if their split had been amicable it probably would've affected me positively in comparison, but at the same time if they had both been people capable of such a split they probably wouldn't have needed to split in the first place. I think largely it's just who our parents are that determines that, and how we choose to use our experiences as adults.

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