Elizabeth Marquardt is vice president for family studies and director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values in New York City. She is the author of Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, 2005 and Three Rivers Press, 2006). Based on the first nationally-representative study of grown children of divorce in the U.S., Marquardt argues that while an amicable divorce is better than a bitter one, even amicable divorces profoundly shape the inner lives of children. The book was reviewed or featured in Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and numerous other publications. Marquardt is co-principal investigator of a national study, “Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Dating and Mating Today.” Her next book, My Daddy’s Name is Donor, based on a new, randomly-drawn sample of the adult offspring of sperm donors, will be published by Harcourt Trade Publishers in 2010.
Marquardt has appeared often on NBC’s Today Show as well as on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360 and Talk Back Live, ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, Fox’s O’Reilly Factor, CBS’s Early Show, and PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly. She has appeared on scores of radio programs including NPR’s All Things Considered Weekend Edition, the Diane Rehm Show, and the Michael Medved Show.
Her writings have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Reader’s Digest, and elsewhere.
Marquardt holds a Master’s in Divinity and an M.A. in international relations from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in history and women’s studies from Wake Forest University. She lives near Chicago with her husband, Jim, a college professor, and their two children.
Speaking Topics
Is There Any Such Thing as a “Good” Divorce?
One quarter of adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five has grown up in divorced families. Elizabeth Marquardt has co-investigated a pioneering national study of these young people, surveying 1500 young adults from both divorced and intact families and interviewing more than seventy of them at length. The results are in her new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce. (Crown)Many experts maintain that there are “good divorces” and assure divorced parents that kids are resilient. The hard truth, Marquardt argues, is that while divorce is sometimes necessary, there is no such thing as a good divorce. An amicable divorce is far better than a bitter one, but even amicable divorces sow inner conflict in the lives of children, profoundly shaping their moral and spiritual lives. In her talk, she shares the stories of grown children of divorce, amplified with new data and practical suggestions for reaching out to these young people.
Ministering to One-Quarter of Today’s Young Adults: The Grown Children of Divorce
Today, one-quarter of young adults are children of divorce. Of those who were active in a church when their parents split up, two-thirds say that no one from the clergy or congregation reached out to them at that time. When they grow up, children of divorce are overall much less religious and much less likely to be part of a faith community. Their absence is a tragic loss for them and the church.
Learn how to welcome young people affected by divorce into the full life of your congregation with Elizabeth Marquardt, M.Div., author of a ground-breaking study on the moral, spiritual, and religious impact of childhood divorce, reported in her new book Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.
Hooking Up, Hanging Out, and Hoping for Mr. Right: College Women on Mating and Dating Today
The Revolution in Parenthood: The Emerging Global Clash Between Adult Rights and Children’s Needs
The State of the Family
