Life Course Stage in Young Adulthood and Intergenerational Congruence in Family Attitudes

We investigated how intergenerational congruence in family‐related attitudes depends on life course stage in young adulthood. Recent data from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study were used; the present sample included 2,041 dyads of young adults and their parents. Findings are discussed in terms of the elasticity in intergenerational attitude congruence in response to young adults' life course transitions. Our results suggest that intergenerational congruence in attitudes about partnership (e.g., marriage, cohabitation, divorce, women's and men's family roles) decreases after young adults have left the parental home and increases when young adults enter parenthood. Congruence concerning intergenerational obligations was not related to young adults' life course stage.     

A Prospective Study of Behavioural Disturbance in Children Who Subsequently Experience Parental Divorce

This study examines changes in children's behaviour as a function of parental divorce. As part of a large scale general population study on the effects of marital disharmony on children, 139 children from the general population were followed up from a previous study. These children and their mothers were interviewed first between 1979 and 1982 (time 1) and then followed up between 1984 and 1986 (time 2). Between the time 1 interview and the time 2 interview, 16 children's parents had separated or divorced. This paper deals with the mothers' report of changes in the behaviour of these children between time 1 and time 2 as a function of their parents' divorce, and compares this with changes in children's behaviour whose parents live in disharmonious (N = 40) or harmonious homes (N = 50). Children's reports of their own behaviour at time 2 are also presented. The data show that children in disharmonious homes and children whose parents subsequently divorce show higher levels of disturbance than children in harmonious homes. Children whose parents subsequently divorce show their disturbance prior to the divorce. Children's coping strategies in response to divorce were also investigated and and an association was found between children's behavioural problems and (a) self-blame and (b) not having friends whose parents had divorced.     

“It Is Not a Big Deal,I Can Do It,Too”: Influence of Parental Divorce on Professional Women's Marital Experience in Turkey

This article reports on a study of how parental divorce affects the marriage and divorce experiences of professional women in Turkey. Drawing on the retrospective accounts of eight professional women in relation to their own divorce and those of their parents, this study highlights the role of parental divorce and cultural context in adult children's attitudes, beliefs, and experiences regarding their own union formation. Based on this small qualitative sample, results demonstrate that parental divorce affected women's entire lives, with considerable impact on their commitment to marriage and view of divorce in general. They learn from their parents that marriages can be broken when they do not function properly. As a result, instead of being more patient or self- sacrificing, as is frequently advised to women in Turkish society, the women in this study readily tended toward divorce as a viable solution to marital problems.     

Children's Definitions of Family Following Divorce of Their Parents

As children adapt to new, non-biologically based family forms as a result of the high incidence of divorce in the United States, new definitions of family may develop. This paper reports results from an anthropological study of children's definitions of their families following divorce of their parents. Interviews were conducted with 29 children of white, middle-class, divorced parents as part of an ongoing study of the effects of divorce on families. These children's definitions of their families fell into five, progressively more expansive types, from a limited, household definition to an expansive type including biological, legal, and non-kin. Children's use of criteria beyond biology or law to define their reconstituted families after divorce of their parents illustrates the voluntary nature of American kinship systems.     

Who Is the Residential Parent? Understanding Discrepancies in Unmarried Parents' Reports

Research examining parental reports of children's living arrangements has often relied on information about legally ordered custody agreements following divorce. This analysis used data from matched pairs of parents (N = 1,156) in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study who live apart to compare mother and father reports of their child's residence 5 years after a nonmarital birth. The authors found that over one third of unmarried parents disagreed about who their child lived with and that conflicting reports were much more likely when fathers spent nights with the mother (an indicator of part‐time cohabitation) and had overnights with the child on their own. The results further suggest that discrepancies in unmarried parents' reports were more closely associated with the complexity and ambiguity of their living situations than with the quality of their relationships with each other. Implications for measuring children's living arrangements in families formed outside of marriage are discussed.     

Impacts of Parents' Divorce on Chinese Children

Abstract

The study examined the impact of parents' divorce on Chinese children's well-being. A Chinese theoretical model was tested using Structural Equation Modeling. The sample consisted of 940 Chinese children aged 6–16. The well-being of children from divorced families was compared with that of two-parent and widowed families. The results showed that children's academic performance mediated the negative impact of divorce on children's well-being. The societal discriminating attitude towards divorce and single-parent families had a strong negative effect on the children's well-being. Parenting skills of the custodial parent had more influence on the children's well-being than the marital conflicts prior to the divorce. Supports from the extended families counterbalanced some negative effects associated with divorce.     

Feeling Caught Between Parents: Adult Children's Relations With Parents and Subjective Well‐Being

Research on divorce has found that adolescents’ feelings of being caught between parents are linked to internalizing problems and weak parent‐child relationships. The present study estimates the effects of marital discord, as well as divorce, on young adult offspring's feelings of being caught in the middle (N =632). Children with parents in high‐conflict marriages were more likely than other children to feel caught between parents. These feelings were associated with lower subjective well‐being and poorer quality parent‐child relationships. Offspring with divorced parents were no more likely than offspring with continuously married parents in low‐conflict relationships to report feeling caught. Feelings of being caught appeared to fade in the decade following parental divorce. These results suggest that, unlike children of divorce, children with parents in conflicted marriages (who do not divorce) may be unable to escape from their parents’ marital problems—even into adulthood.     

Parental Predivorce Relations and Offspring Postdivorce Well‐Being

This 2‐part study uses national longitudinal interview data from parents and their adult children to examine the way in which predivorce marital conflict influences the impact of divorce on children. In the 1st study, we find that the dissolution of low‐conflict marriages appears to have negative effects on offspring's lives, whereas the dissolution of high‐conflict marriages appears to have beneficial effects. The dissolution of low‐conflict marriages is associated with the quality of children's intimate relationships, social support from friends and relatives, and general psychological well‐being. The 2nd study considers how parents in low‐conflict marriages that end in divorce differ from other parents before divorce. We find that low‐conflict parents who divorce are less integrated into the community, have fewer impediments to divorce, have more favorable attitudes toward divorce, are more predisposed to engage in risky behavior, and are less likely to have experienced a parental divorce.     

The Effects of Divorce on Children: Married and Divorced Parents' Perspectives

Three hypotheses, derived from the social psychology literature, regarding the impact of marital status history on parents' attitudes toward the impact of divorce on children were examined. Married parents (n = 118) were expected to report more negative effects of divorce on children than divorced parents (n = 114); mothers and fathers whose own parents remained married were expected to rate the impact of divorce more negatively than mothers and fathers whose parents had divorced; and, divorced parents who initiated their own divorce were expected to report fewer negative effects of divorce on children than parents who did not initiate divorce. All three hypotheses were supported, extending the self- and vested-interest research to the divorce literature.     

The Coparental Relationship of Divorced Spouses:

The authors examined the effects of divorce on the school behavior of a sample of 32 second, third, and fourth grade children. Results suggested that coparental relationsip variables (such as frequency and quality of interaction) may be more significant influences on children's school behavior than the marital status of their parents. In this regard: (1) only one significant differences was found in the school behavior of children from divorced and those from the control group of intact families; (2) regression analyses did not select family status as a significant predictor of problem variables and children's school behavior. These results have implications for teachers and for mental health professionals who counsel post-divorce families.     

Do Young Mothers and Fathers Differ in the Likelihood of Returning Home?

Building on research examining “boomerang” adult children, the author examines multigenerational living among young parents. Returning home likely differs between young mothers and fathers given variation in socioeconomic characteristics, health and risk taking, their own children's coresidence, and union stability. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97), the author finds that more than 40% of young parents (n = 2,721) live with their own parents at their first child's birth or subsequently. Mothers are generally less likely to move home than fathers but only when not controlling for child coresidence and union stability. Individuals who live with all their children are less likely to return home, and controlling for child coresidence reverses gender differences, though this association disappears in the full model. Young parents who are stably single and those who experience dissolution are highly likely to return home compared to the stably partnered, with the association significantly stronger for fathers than mothers.     

Parental Divorce and Child Mental Health Trajectories

A process‐oriented approach to parental divorce locates the experience within the social and developmental context of children's lives, providing greater insight into how parental divorce produces vulnerability in some children and resiliency in others. The current study involves prospectively tracking a nationally representative sample of Canadian children of ages 4–7 and living with two biological parents at initial interview in 1994 (N = 2,819), and comparing the mental health trajectories of children whose parents remain married with those whose parents divorce by 1998. Results from growth curve models confirm that, even before marital breakup, children whose parents later divorce exhibit higher levels of anxiety/depression and antisocial behavior than children whose parents remain married. There is a further increase in child anxiety/depression but not antisocial behavior associated with the event of parental divorce itself. Controlling for predivorce parental socioeconomic and psychosocial resources fully accounts for poorer child mental health at initial interview among children whose parents later divorce, but does not explain the divorce‐specific increase in anxiety/depression. Finally, a significant interaction between parental divorce and predivorce levels of family dysfunction suggests that child antisocial behavior decreases when marriages in highly dysfunctional families are dissolved.     

Reconfigured Everyday Lives of Children from Divorced-Parent Families in Singapore

With the termination of a marriage, children involved inevitably experience dramatic changes in different facets of their lives. This article makes use of narrative accounts of divorced single parents to investigate how their marital dissolution has impacted and changed their children's lives. Empirical data was collected through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 25 Singaporean divorced parents. Within the policy and social context of Singapore society, I highlight transformations in three specific aspects of the children's lives: one, the reconfigurations of familial relationships and formation of a new family unit; two, the creation of and adaptation to new family practices and routine; three, the adoption of new social identity following parental divorce. This article hopes to present a more nuanced understanding of the divorce experience by emphasizing both the precarious and productive aspects in the children's lives, contra to the existing divorce literature that typically focuses on the former.     

Parenthood and Life Satisfaction: Why Don't Children Make People Happy?

Previous research on the association between parenthood and life satisfaction has shown that parents of minor children are not more satisfied with their lives than childless people. This study addressed the question of why children do not enhance their parents' life satisfaction. A major objective of this study was to determine whether and to what extent the costs of raising children act as suppressors of life satisfaction. The empirical analysis applied fixed‐effects models and used data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel (1994–2010, N = 16,021). The 3 primary findings of this study were that (a) parenthood by itself has substantial and enduring positive effects on life satisfaction; (b) these positive effects are offset by financial and time costs of parenthood; and (c) the impact of these costs varies considerably with family factors, such as the age and number of children, marital status, and the parents' employment arrangements.     

Family Environment and Adolescents' Well‐Being Before and After Parents' Marital Disruption: A Longitudinal Analysis

Although previous research has noted that children of divorce tend to fare less well than peers raised in families with two biological parents, much less is known about how parents' marital disruption affects children as a continuous process in its different phases. Based on two waves of a large, nationally representative panel, this study demonstrates that even before the disruption, both male and female adolescents from families that subsequently dissolve exhibit more academic, psychological, and behavioral problems than peers whose parents remain married. Families on the verge of breakup are also characterized by less intimate parent‐parent and parent‐child relationships, less parental commitment to children's education, and fewer economic and human resources. These differences in family environment account for most well‐being deficits among adolescents in predisrupted families. Furthermore, the deterioration in different domains of the family environment appears to be associated with maladjustment in different aspects of children's lives. The postdisruption effects on adolescents can either be totally or largely predicted by predisruption factors and by changes in family circumstances during the period coinciding with the disruption. Finally, the analyses indicate that female adolescents are as likely to be affected by the parental divorce process as male adolescents.     

WHAT DETERMINES FAMILY STRUCTURE?

We use data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to estimate the effects of policy and labor market variables on the demographic behaviors that determine children's family structure experiences: union formation and dissolution, and fertility. Male and female wages have substantial effects on family structure for children of black and Hispanic mothers. The tax treatment of children also affects family structure. Welfare reform, welfare benefits, and unilateral divorce had much smaller effects on family structure for the children of this cohort of women. Trends in wages and tax rates explain only a small share of the observed changes in family structure in recent decades. (JEL J12)     

Conflict or Divorce? Does Parental Conflict and/or Divorce Increase the Likelihood of Adult Children's Cohabiting and Marital Dissolution?

The short- and long-term effects of family structure on child well-being remains a hotly contested area among both researchers and policymakers. Although previous research documents that children of divorce are more prone to divorce themselves, much of this research has been plagued by multiple data and analytic problems. A second problematic issue relates to whether it is the divorce per se that leads to increased divorce or rather the conflict that may precede the divorce. In this article we examine whether children who experience parental conflict and/or divorce are more likely to experience a cohabiting breakup or divorce as adults compared with children from low conflict and/or intact families. Our examination improves on past research by using a three-wave longitudinal data set and by controlling for predivorce family characteristics, including the conflict between parents before divorce. We extend previous research on the effect of parental conflict and divorce on adult children's likelihood of divorce by also examining the likelihood of a cohabiting dissolution.     

Parenting From Abroad: Migration,Nonresident Father Involvement,and Children's Education in Mexico

In Mexico, a country with high emigration rates, parental migration matches divorce as a contributor to child–father separation. Yet little has been written about children's relationships with migrating parents. In this study, I use nationally representative data from the 2005 Mexican Family Life Survey to model variation in the interaction between 739 children in Mexico and their nonresident fathers. I demonstrate that, from the perspective of sending households, parental migration and parental divorce are substantively distinct experiences. Despite considerable geographic separation, Mexican children have significantly more interaction with migrating fathers than they do with fathers who have left their homes following divorce. Further, ties with migrant fathers are positively correlated with schooling outcomes, which potentially mitigates the observed education costs of family separation.     

Family Communication as a Mediator of Child Adjustment to Divorce

Abstract

Reduced family conflict, consistency in roles and parenting, and limited negative life changes seem to be particularly important variables in promoting children's adjustment to divorce.

The impact of family functioning on child adjustment was investigated in a sample of 22 recently separated or divorced families with a total of 32 children. A series of multiple regression analyses using factors on the Family Assessment Device to predict Child Behavior Checklist scores indicated that family functioning is a significant predictor of children's Externalizing behavior problems. The Communication factor accounted for a significant portion of unique variance in the externalizing scores that was unaccounted for by the other factors. When separated parents can communicate with each other to co-parent their children, as well as communicate affective limit-setting messages to their children, the children exhibit less behavioral problems.     

Effects of Divorce on Children's Perceptions of Parent Behavior and Locus of Control

This study examined the effects of divorce on later latency children from a nonclinical population. Perceptions of parent behavior and locus of control were assessed for 68 middle class children aged 9 to 12 years. Results showed a general absence of differences between children from divorced and intact families in their perceptions of parent behavior and locus of control. There were no significant differences between children from divorced and intact families on the three factors of the Children's Reports of Parent Behavior Inventory (CRPBI) (Acceptance-Rejection, Psychological Control-Psychological Autonomy, and Firm Control-Lax Control), 17 of 18 scales of the CRPBI, and the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control scale. However, the Possessiveness scale of the CRPBI indicated that children of divorce perceived both their mothers and fathers as significantly more possessive than did children from intact families. The results showed that parental divorce did not impact strongly on children's perceptions of parents and locus of control and suggest minimal adverse effects of divorce, at least for children from the volunteer nonclinical population studied.