The concept of the "good divorce" is in the cultural crosshairs, thanks to two things: the attention being paid to the independent movie "The Squid and the Whale," and media coverage of what claims to be the first survey based on a nationally-representative sample of young adults aged 18 to 35 to ask broad questions about the emotional lives of those whose parents divorced before they were 14.

The survey was carried out by Elizabeth Marquardt, a child of divorce herself. It revealed that the children of divorce are more likely, as adults, to say that they felt like a different person with each parent; sometimes felt like outsiders in their own homes; and they had been alone a lot during childhood. Marquardt wrote a column about her findings that appeared yesterday in the Washington Post.

Marquardt's research doesn't challenge the reality that most children of divorced parents will grow into successful adults, but she does argue that the process is often more difficult and painful for them. Her research also is not designed to get at the more nuanced -- and to my mind more important -- question of how children of divorced parents fare compared to children who grow up in high-conflict marriages.

The idea of the good divorce has served a real purpose: it gives divorcing parents an understanding of how important it was to make sure both parents stayed connected to their kids, and probably helped many avoid the common pitfalls of verbally running down an absent spouse, asking the kids to be spies in the other parent's home, and otherwise making them miserable double agents in their own lives.

(My own parents divorced in the pre-"good divorce" era, and I think would have benefitted from the concept.)

But Noah Baumbach's movie (which pokes wicked fun at the absurdities of some joint-custody arrangments) and Marquardt's survey and book, taken together, are a useful reminder that even the best divorce is hard on kids.

Whether the take-home message is that parents should be more willing to "suck it up" in a bad marriage is the big question. Most of the divorces I have been aware of through the years were triggered by one of two things: alcoholism or another addiction, or infidelity. I think there is some research indicating that children in marriages where one partner is addicted benefit from divorce, and I'm not aware of what the research says about those marriages threatened by affairs.