Parental Divorce and Children’s Schooling in Rural Malawi

A growing body of literature has examined the impact of different types of family structures on children’s schooling in sub-Saharan Africa. These studies have investigated how living arrangements, gender of the household head, parental death, and paternal migration are related to schooling. Although many sub-Saharan African countries have high divorce rates, very few studies have explored the impact of parental divorce on children’s schooling. The present study uses three waves of data from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH) to investigate the effect of parental divorce on children’s schooling and the possible mechanisms driving this relationship. Unlike prior studies, this study uses child-level fixed-effects models to control for selection into divorce. Results show that parental divorce is associated with lower grade attainment and a larger schooling gap, defined as the number of years a child is behind in school (among children currently attending school). Although no association exists between parental divorce and current school attendance, girls affected by divorce are significantly less likely to be attending school. Differences in economic resources, maternal coresidence, or maternal psychological well-being do not explain the relationship between parental divorce and children’s schooling.     

Consequences of family disruption on children’s educational outcomes in norway

Using high-quality data from Norwegian population registers, we examine the relationship between family disruption and children’s educational outcomes. We distinguish between disruptions caused by parental divorce and paternal death and, using a simultaneous equation model, pay particular attention to selection bias in the effect of divorce. We also allow for the possibility that disruption may have different effects at different stages of a child’s educational career. Our results suggest that selection on time-invariant maternal characteristics is important and works to overstate the effects of divorce on a child’s chances of continuing in education. Nevertheless, the experience of marital breakdown during childhood is associated with lower levels of education, and the effect weakens with the child’s age at disruption. The effects of divorce are most pronounced for the transitions during or just beyond the high school level. In models that do not allow for selection, children who experienced a father’s death appear less disadvantaged than children whose parents divorced. After we control for selection, however, differences in the educational qualifications of children from divorced and bereaved families narrow substantially and, at mean ages of divorce, are almost non-existent.     

The influence of parents’ marital dissolutions on children’s attitudes toward family formation

We investigate the influence of parents’ marital dissolutions on their children’s attitudes toward several dimensions of family formation. Hypotheses focus on the role of parents’ attitudes as a mechanism linking parents’ behavior to their children’s attitudes. We test these hypotheses using intergenerational panel data that include measures of parents’ attitudes taken directly from parents and measures of children’s attitudes taken directly from children. Results demonstrate strong effects of parental divorce, remarriage, and widowhood on children’s attitudes toward premarital sex, cohabitation, marriage. childbearing, and divorce. The results also show that parents’ own attitudes link their behavior to their children’s attitudes, although substantial effects of parental behavior remain after controlling for parents’ attitudes.     

Divorce and parity progression following the death of a child: A register-based study from Finland

Most studies that have examined whether a child’s death influences parental relationship stability have used small-scale data sets and their results are inconclusive. A likely reason is that child loss affects not only the risk of parental separation, but also the risk of having another child. Hence parity progression and separation must be treated as two competing events in relation to child loss. The analysis in this paper used Finnish register data from 1971 to 2003, covering over 100,000 married couples whose durations of both first marriage and parenthood could be observed. We ran parity-specific Cox regressions in which process time started from the birth of each additional child. All marriages included women of childbearing age, none of whom had experienced any child death on entering the analysis. We find that child loss only modestly influences the divorce risk, whereas its effect on the risk of parity progression is considerable.     

Parental divorce and partnership dissolution in adulthood: Evidence from a British cohort study

From a longitudinal survey of a British cohort born in 1958 this study finds that, by age 33, off-spring of parents who divorced are more likely to have dissolved their first partnerships. This finding persists after taking into account age at first partnership, type of first partnership (marital, pre-marital cohabiting union, and cohabiting union), and indicators of class background and childhood and adolescent school achievement and behaviour problems. Some of these factors are associated with partnership dissolution in their own right, but the association between parental divorce and second generation partnership dissolution is largely independent of them. Demographic factors, including type of and age at first partnership, were important links between parental divorce and partnership dissolution. Moreover, the estimated effects of parental divorce were substantially reduced when the demographic variables were taken into account, suggesting that cohabitation and early partnership may be important pathways through which a parental divorce, or the unmeasured characteristics correlated with it, affect partnership dissolution.     

Influences on Pregnancy-Termination Decisions in Matlab, Bangladesh

We investigate factors affecting women’s decisions to terminate pregnancies in Matlab, Bangladesh, using logistic regression on high-quality data from the Demographic Surveillance System on more than 215,000 pregnancies that occurred between 1978 and 2008. Variables associated with the desire not to have another birth soon (very young and older maternal age, a greater number of living children, the recent birth of twins or of a son, a short interval since a recent live birth) are associated with a greater likelihood of pregnancy termination, and the effects of many of these explanatory variables are stronger in more recent years. Women are less likely to terminate a pregnancy if they don’t have any living sons or recently experienced a miscarriage, a stillbirth, or the death of a child. The higher the woman’s level of education, the more likely she is to terminate a pregnancy. Between 1982 and the mid-2000s, pregnancy termination was significantly less likely in the area of Matlab with better family planning services.     

Grandparental availability for child care and maternal labor force participation: pension reform evidence from Italy

In this paper, we exploit pension reform-induced changes in retirement eligibility requirements to assess the role of grandparental childcare availability in the labor force participation of women with children under 15. Our analysis shows that, among the women studied, those whose own mothers are retirement eligible have a 11% higher probability of being in the labor force than those whose mothers are ineligible. The pension eligibility of maternal grandfathers and paternal grandparents, however, has no significant effect on the women’s labor force participation. We also demonstrate that the eligibility of maternal grandmothers mainly captures the effect of their availability for childcare. Hence, pension reforms, by potentially robbing households of an important source of flexible, low-cost childcare, could have unintended negative consequences for the employment rates of women with young children.     

Communicating population and family planning

This thorough look at the change in the American family 1900-1700 finds that 40% of marriages among women now in their late 20s may end in divorce, that the divorce rate is stabilizing, that between 1-4% of unrelated men and women are living together in informal unions (the figure made difficult to obtain by the difficulty in framing the question), that 15 million adults live alone, and that only 67% of children live with their own once-married parents. About 33% of births are premaritally conceived. The median age for mothers at birth of last child has moved downward from 33 years in the early 1900s to about 30 years. Childbearing has declined from 3.9 children per mother in the early 1900s to 2.5. The period of childbearing has been compressed to about 7 years, between ages 23-30. 10% of remarried women's children are born between marriages. 50% of pregnancies end in abortion. It was found that persons who had completed an educational level, whether it be high school or college, generally had more stable marriages; those who had not completed a level were more likely to get divorced. Despite changes in lifestyle, however, some typical family situations are experienced by most Americans. 2 of 3 marriages will last until death of 1 of the partners and most young women questioned in census surveys expect 2 children.     

The effects of parental leave extension on training for young women

Using three datasets for West Germany, we estimate the effect of the extension of parental leave from between 10 and 18 to 36 months on young women’s participation in job-related training. Specifically, we employ difference-in-differences identification strategies using control groups of older women and young and older men. We find that parental leave extension negatively affects job-related training for young women, even if they do not have children, especially when the focus is on employer-arranged training. There is tentative evidence that young women partly compensated for this reduction in employer-arranged training by increasing training on their own initiative.     

Attachment Relationships and Psychological Adjustment of Married Adults

The present study explored relations among remembered parental (paternal and maternal) acceptance in childhood, spouse acceptance and psychological adjustment of adults. It also explored whether remembered childhood experiences of parental acceptance mediate the relation between perceived spouse acceptance and psychological adjustment. The sample consisted of 354 married adult men (178) and women (176). Results showed that the more accepting both men and women perceived their spouses to be, the better was their psychological adjustment. Similarly, the more accepting both men and women remembered their parents had been to them during childhood, the better was their psychological adjustment. Standard multiple regression analyses revealed that paternal acceptance mediated the relation between perceived spouse acceptance and the psychological adjustment of both men and women. In addition, remembered maternal acceptance mediated the relation between men’s (but not women’s) perceived spouse acceptance and psychological adjustment.     

Estimating the completeness of death registration

In this paper, U.S. data from the 1981 Child Health Supplement are used to estimate the effect of a child's disability or serious chronic illness on: (1) the risk of the parents' divorcing before the child reaches the age of 11, and (2) the mother's chances of remarriage after divorce. Divorce is significantly more common among the parents of disabled or sickly children than among those of healthy children, and these disruptive effects of a child's frailty are even stronger when children are between six and nine years old than when they are younger. Possibly, divorce only becomes a viable option for some parents once a sickly child has started to spend part of the day away from home, in school. In contrast, a child's health status does not predict the mother's waiting time to remarriage. A range of potentially confounding demographic factors are controlled in the models, and their effects on children's chances of experiencing parental divorce are as expected. For example, having a mother who married young significantly predicts parental divorce.     

Does It Matter What She Wants? The Role of Individual Preferences Against Unmarried Motherhood in Young Women’s Likelihood of a Nonmarital First Birth

Most young people in the United States express the desire to marry. Norms at all socioeconomic levels posit marriage as the optimal context for childbearing. At the same time, nonmarital fertility accounts for approximately 40 % of U.S. births, experienced disproportionately by women with educational attainment less than a bachelor’s degree. Research has shown that women’s intentions for the number and timing of children and couples’ intent to marry are strong predictors of realized fertility and marriage. The present study investigates whether U.S. young women’s preferences about nonmarital fertility, as stated before childbearing begins, predict their likelihood of having a nonmarital first birth. I track marriage and fertility histories through ages 24–30 of women asked at ages 11–16 whether they would consider unmarried childbearing. One-quarter of women who responded “no” in fact had a nonmarital birth by age 24–30. The ability of women and their partners to access material resources in adulthood were, as expected, the strongest predictors of the likelihood of nonmarital childbearing. Nonetheless, I find that women who said they would not consider nonmarital childbearing had substantially higher hazards of fertility postponement and especially of marital fertility, even after controlling for race/ethnicity, mother’s educational attainment, family of origin intactness, self-efficacy and planning ability, perceived future prospects, and markers of own educational attainment and work experience into early adulthood.     

The effect of female education on marital matches and child health in Bangladesh

This paper examines the effects of female education on marriage outcomes by exploiting the exogenous variation generated by the Female Secondary School Stipend Program in Bangladesh, which made secondary education free for rural girls. Our findings show that an additional year of female education leads to an increase in 0.72 years of husband’s education and that better educated women pair with spouses who have better occupations and are closer in age to their own, suggesting assortative mating. Those educated women appear to experience greater autonomy in making decisions on receiving their own health care and visiting their family. Furthermore, educated women have lower fertility and use more maternal health care, and their children have better health outcomes than those of less-educated women. Overall, our results suggest that the marriage market is one of the channels through which women’s education affects their life outcomes.     

Feathered nest/gilded cage: Parental income and leaving home in the transition to adulthood

The growing study of leaving home in young adulthood in the United States has been hampered by data and measurement problems, which are producing a major theoretical confusion about the role of parental resources in influencing young adults’ leaving home. Does high parental income retain young adults in the home or subsidize their leaving (and parental privacy)? This paper uses the 1984 panel of Survey of Income and Program Participation to clarify this issue, and shows that the effects of parental resources differ depending on the route out of the home under consideration (marriage or premarital residential independence). Effects change substantially over the nest-leaving ages, but relatively few differences are found between young men and young women.     

More Evidence for Trends in the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce: A Completed Cohort Approach Using Data From the General Social Survey

Many studies have demonstrated that the children of divorce are disproportionately likely to end their own marriages. In previous work, I showed that the transmission of divorce between generations weakened substantially for General Social Survey (GSS) respondents interviewed between 1973 and 1996 (Wolfinger 1999); Li and Wu (2006, 2008) contended that my finding is a methodological artifact of the GSS’s lack of marriage duration data. This article presents a completed-cohort approach to studying divorce using the GSS. The results confirm a decline in the probability of divorce transmission that cannot be explained by the right-censoring bias alleged by Li and Wu. This finding contributes to an ongoing debate about trends in the negative consequences of parental divorce, as well as demonstrating a useful approach to right-censored phenomena when event history data are not available.     

Recession and Divorce in the United States, 2008–2011

Recession may increase divorce through a stress mechanism, or reduce divorce by exacerbating cost barriers or strengthening family bonds. After establishing an individual-level model predicting US women’s divorce, the paper tests period effects, and whether unemployment and foreclosures are associated with the odds of divorce using the 2008–2011 American Community Survey. Results show a downward spike in the divorce rate after 2008, almost recovering to the expected level by 2011, which suggests a negative recession effect. On the other hand, state foreclosure rates are positively associated with the odds of divorce with individual controls, although this effect is not significant when state fixed effects are introduced. State unemployment rates show no effect on odds of divorce. Future research will have to determine why national divorce odds fell during the recession, while state-level economic indicators were not strongly associated with divorce. Exploratory analysis which shows unemployment decreasing divorce odds for those with college degrees, while foreclosures have the opposite effect, provide one possible avenue for such research.     

Gender Differences in the Consequences of Divorce: A Study of Multiple Outcomes

In this study, I examined gender differences in the consequences of divorce by tracing annual change in 20 outcome measures covering four domains: economic, housing and domestic, health and well-being, and social. I used data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) and fixed-effects panel regression models on a sample of N = 18,030 individuals initially observed in a marital union, N = 1,220 of whom divorced across the observation period (1984–2015). Three main findings emerged from the analysis. First, men were more vulnerable to short-term consequences of divorce for subjective measures of well-being, but postdivorce adaptation alleviated gender differences in these outcomes. Second, a medium-term view on multiple outcomes showed more similarity than differences between women and men. The medium-term consequences of divorce were similar in terms of subjective economic well-being; mental health, physical health, and psychological well-being; residential moves, homeownership, and satisfaction with housework; and chances of repartnering, social integration with friends and relatives, and feelings of loneliness. Third, the key domain in which large and persistent gender differences emerged were women’s disproportionate losses in household income and associated increases in their risk of poverty and single parenting. Taken together, these findings suggest that men’s disproportionate strain of divorce is transient, whereas women’s is chronic.     

Measuring Adult Children’s Perceptions of Their Parents’ Acceptance and Rejection of Their Sexual Orientation: Initial Development of the Parental Acceptance and Rejection of Sexual Orientation Scale (PARSOS)

ABSTRACT

The Parental Acceptance and Rejection of Sexual Orientation Scale was administered to 256 self-identified lesbian, gay, bisexual, or queer adults who had been out of the closet to their parents for at least 1 year. Principal component analysis revealed a clear two-component solution: parental acceptance and parental rejection. Findings showed that perceived maternal sexual orientation-specific acceptance was higher, and perceived maternal sexual orientation-specific rejection was lower, for gay/bisexual sons compared to their lesbian/bisexual daughters. Results of regression analyses suggest that both perceived sexual orientation specific acceptance and rejection predicted adult children’s psychological symptoms after accounting for perceived global parental acceptance and rejection and the child’s gender. The scale’s utility for research and practice are noted.     

Perspectives on the recent upturn in divorce and remarriage

The divorce rate per thousand married women under 45 years of age in the United States increased by two–thirds between the mid-1950’s and 1970. During the same period, the remarriage rate per thousand divorced or widowed women under 55 years of age rose about one-third. By contrast, first marriages per thousand single women under 45 years of age declined by one-tenth since the mid-1950’s. These changes reinforce the general impression that a fundamental modification of life styles and values relating to marriage has been taking place. An analysis of nationwide data on birth cohorts from 1900 to 1954 demonstrates that early marriage has declined since the mid-1950’s but leaves open the question as to whether lifelong singleness is becoming more prevalent. The cohort study shows that the upward trend in divorce is not “phasing out” yet, as it did after World War II. An estimated 25 to 29 percent of all women near 30 years old now have ended or will end their first marriage in divorce. About four-fifths of these divorced women have remarried or probably will do so. Of all women around 30 years old now, some five to ten percent may be expected to experience divorce at least twice during their lifetime.