by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

Remember when you were tiny, how you’d motor over to dad and then mom would whisper your name and you’d reverse course and she’d pick you up in a swirl of delicious laughter? And remember when you held mom and dad’s low-slung hands high over your head as you marched to the park where you’d dash down the hill, wings flapping like a mad fledgling? And remember when they sat you down on the edge of your bed and told you that they won’t be living together anymore and that nothing would change but how everything, in fact, did change?

Remember that?

Misguided souls frequently inform me - as if it’s a minor detail - that they chose to no longer live as a couple with the person they made children with. I politely nod but secretly shudder. I want to force them to see into the dark heart of a child of divorce in the same shock-treatment way cops force drunk drivers to go to morgues to stare at cold corpses on slabs.

Kids of divorce are in the major leagues of human suffering. It’s in their eyes and their hesitant smiles. If you can’t see it, then get a Braille copy of countless academic studies that say so. According to a recent exhaustive study from Sweden - where single parents are offered considerable financial support - kids of single parents are far more frequently depressed and suicidal and have more problems later in life. Even step-parents don’t solve much. In other studies, prematurely embittered youth frequently report that they would have preferred it if one of their parents had died rather than left.

My own childhood consisted of cheerful family jaunts in the station wagon, which I assumed would continue. Suddenly the good times were replaced by solitary hours of TV watching, interspersed with long bouts of standing alone out on the lawn. Dismal, miserable pain I wouldn’t wish on any kid.

Now Quebec is pumping out armies of brokenhearted youth. Our divorce rate, at eight per cent in 1969, hovers around 50 per cent, and our many unmarried couples have even higher split rates. Something like 30,000 innocent young Quebecers - the equivalent of the entire student population of McGill - are being sentenced to the world of lonely despair every year. Our youth suicide and dropout rates are correspondingly high.

Many couples justify the semi-abandonment by suggesting that it’s better to split than to argue in front of their bambinos. But if a child is too fragile to witness an occasional verbal disagreement, then why would that kid be able to withstand being nuked by the loss of an at-home parent? Personally, my parents’ domestic squabbles fascinated me like an amateur production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Besides, when the words and frying pans stop flying, dad’s still around to drive you to the mall and mom’s still there to pack the sandwiches.

If you’re a man who casually chose to ditch your fun baby because you figure you could get better action elsewhere, you’re an idiot. If you’re a well-intentioned father squeezed out of home, know and exercise your fatherly rights.

If you’re a woman, mate with an earnest, domesticated dullard. Failing that, try tolerating and taming the alpha jerk you chose to breed with. Resist the temptation to seek Oprah-riffic self-affirmation and a Murphy Brown-issue single mama halo, because it’s statistically inevitable that hardship and deprivation will ensue.

Those who defend one ism or another have politicized this issue, so such suggestions are doubtlessly offensive to some political stripe. But such political chatter means little to a vulnerable kid, and being anti-child is ultimately even more offensive than being racist or sexist because children are the defenceless people.

The casual stroll into single parenthood, like government deficits, STDs and Frisbee football, is yet another crap gift of the boomer generation. It’s time to phase it out.

It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. But it takes two adults. If not for your mate then, if you possibly can, stick together for your kid.

Comments? kgravy@openface.ca