Divorce rates among the young, will they be higher or lower?

Great Debates
1

*For purposes of this debate I define “young” as meaning any person who has been born since the divorce became 50% (or there abouts, I know many take issue with that common statistic.) I hesitate to use the word “generation” since this issue pertains to both many people in gen-x and the following generation. *

Are people who have been born since divorce became a very common way to disolve a marriage (as opposed to "until death do us part) likely to experience significantly higher or lower divorce rates than people born earlier? I know that the divorce rates are currently falling, but I’m not sure that the people I’m asking about have themselves married in any signifcant numbers.

This issue isn’t restricted to children of divorce, since they will influence those children whose parents stayed married, too, of course. Basically, I’m curious as to what sort of influence being, or having grown up with, children of divorce will have on people’s own marriages. Will it make people less likely to divorce since so many have exprienced the pain of broken families first hand? More likely to divorce because they have lived seeing so many of their parents and other role models do it? Or simply less likely to marry in the first place because they lack proper models for healthy relationships? And is there any realistic way to predict this sort of thing in the first place?

2

With divorce becoming quite common in the past 100 years I would have to say, yes, we are unlikely to see that figure (50%) drop very dramatically. However, you must also take into consideration that in some circles, marriage is becoming passe. For instance, in Quebec, there is a significant trend (especially among the francophone population) to eschew marriage for common law living arrangements. In fact, many young people view marriage as enslavement. I suppose it is a sort of backlash from the highly oppressive and controlling role the Catholic church played in people’s lives until the late 60’s or so.

But in general, like much of society, I think that the rate of divorces can be described as a swing of a pendulum. The frequency will rise and fall depending on how conservative or liberal society gets.

Also factor in the fact that people are living considerably longer lives with much more leisure time (at least in first world countries) and I think you can expect that some people may opt for a change of partner at least once in their life.