In her book The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, Judith Wallerstein writes about the negative impact divorce has on children:

Children in postdivorce families do not, on the whole, look happier, healthier, or more well adjusted even if one or both parents are happier.

National studies show that children from divorced and remarried families are more aggressive toward their parents and teachers. They experience more depression, have more learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems with peers than children from intact families….

[Being the child of a divorced family is] feeling sad, lonely, and angry during childhood. It's traveling on airplanes alone when you're seven to visit your parent. It's having no choice about how you spend your time and feeling like a second-class citizen compared with your friends in intact families who have some say about how they spend their weekends and their vacations. It's wondering whether you'll have any financial help for college from your college-educated father, given that he has no legal obligation to pay….

It's reaching adulthood with acute anxiety. Will you ever find a faithful woman to love you? Will you find a man you can trust?… Not one of the men or women from divorced families whose lives I report on in this book wanted their children to repeat their childhood experiences…. They envied friends who grew up in intact families.