by Robert Barden

Created on: March 12, 2009

Good news America, it seems the divorce rate in this country is beginning to decline. This is good news unless you are among the nearly one million couples that were divorced in this country last year. That's almost two million broken hearts and nearly a million children whose lives will be changed forever by events they don't want and can't control. I'm sure the statistical drop in the divorce rate means nothing to the roughly 3 million people who joined the ranks of broken families last year.

The statistics are actually rather meaningless. Trying to extrapolate relevant information from the U.S. Census Bureau figures on divorce is akin to trying to get a straight answer from a politician. The only consensus among the professionals who analyze this data is that current methods of defining the divorce rate are flawed. Ask 10 experts and you'll get 12 different answers. Whether the trend is going up or down is of little if any significance to those who go through a divorce. It's said that misery loves company, but I'm sure there's no comfort in knowing that there's another 900 thousand couples sharing the experience.

Rarely do couples go through a divorce alone. Even when no children are involved, there's usually an intricately woven web of family and friends who are affected by the breakup.

These relationships take on a whole new dynamic as the battle lines are drawn and people begin lining up behind one side or the other just as they did on the wedding day with guests of the bride seated on one side of the aisle, and friends and family of the groom on the other.

But which side do the children line up behind? Although there are those situations where there is a clear choice of one parent over the other, more often the children are in the middle being torn apart. Worse yet are the cases where the children are used as weapons, and custody becomes the ultimate strategic armament. Then there are those situations where one parent disappears from the scene altogether never to be seen or heard from again. Clearly the children are better off without this type of person in their lives, but try explaining that to a child.

For the children of divorce it's a no-win situation. Even when faced with a best-case scenario two loving, caring, mature adult parents parting ways amicably there's still no solution that the children prefer over the life they had before the divorce. For the parents, a divorce often provides an escape from a relationship gone bad, but for the children it's

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