Children of Divorce

Stories of Loss and Growth, Second Edition

John H. Harvey, Mark A. Fine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136951688
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Interpersonal Relations in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Featuring excerpts of essays collected from over one thousand young adults while in the throes of divorce, this book paints a picture of the pain and the hope shown by the storytellers. By framing the narratives with an analysis of the most recent divorce literature, the authors provide readers with a greater and more vivid understanding of the effects of divorce.

Challenging the contention that most children will be irretrievably hurt by their parents' divorce, some stories clearly demonstrate the strength and resilience many have learned in dealing with a divorce in the family. Emphasis is placed on how hope about the possibilities of having close relationships - as well as a willingness to create stronger families in their own lives - represent abiding motivations in this sample of young people. The authors hope that the use of the raw input of respondents will make the experiences more realistic and ultimately help people deal with major loss events in their lives.

Highlights of the new edition include:

• A new chapter (7) that demonstrates the messiness of divorce (infidelity, dysfunctional interactions, multiple marriages/relationships, and the financial expense), the fading stigma of divorce, the latest divorce rates, the increased average age of first time marriages, and the recent hook-up phenomenon wherein young people are showing a reluctance to commitment
• Updated throughout with the most current demographic data, new findings from the top researchers in the field, and the latest intervention programs
• A review of the Divorce Variability and Fluidity Model (DVFM) that helps predict variability in adjusting to divorce
• More suggestions to help children adapt to divorce, including material on parenting education classes and mediation as a method for easing the process
• A list of readings and suggested websites for further review
• More tables and graphs to summarize key concepts.

An ideal supplement for courses on divorce, family studies, close relationships, and loss and trauma taught in human development and family studies, and clinical, counseling, and social psychology, as well as communication, social work, and sociology, these engaging stories also appeal to practitioners and those interested in the effects of divorce in general.

1
THE PERVASIVENESS OF DIVORCE AND
THE VALUE OF DIVERSE VOICES

WHY THIS BOOK?

Why are we (John Harvey and Mark Fine) writing this book? We developed this book because the loss of our close, intimate relationships is a daunting, sometimes devastating experience that each of us will experience in life. It also has been occurring at a contagious rate since 1980 in this society, now stretching to most parts of the Western world. All of us will experience such losses in the form of breakups of romantic relations, and millions of us will be directly affected by divorce in our lives. All of us will be affected at least indirectly by cultural changes attributable to divorce (e.g., see discussion in this chapter about the increased role of grandparents in taking on primary parenting duties in the 21st century).

We also write both from personal experience in losing many relationships to breakup, including divorce, and from our standpoint as college professors and researchers in the field of close relationships. In the latter role, we have heard countless stories of relationship loss. Indeed, the core of this book is about discourses of divorce. First, we report and comment on a selected set of scholars’ arguments about divorce in the 21st century. Then, the stories of many young people directly affected by divorce in their families form the centerpiece of this book. These stories have been collected from hundreds of John Harvey’s students since the mid-1990s and are reported with the students’ permission; names and various specific details have been changed as necessary to ensure the anonymity of the students.

The pain associated with the loss of close relationships is a cultural burden of vast proportions. It extends beyond the persons who dissolve their relationships to children, parents, and dear friends. We also write as parents who are trying to help their own children (Harvey: a teenaged son; Fine: two daughters in their early 20s) deal with, and it is hoped even thrive in the context of, their parents’ divorce. This extremely important topic receives considerable attention in this book. Many scholars and writers are weighing in on the impacts of divorce on children. We do the same from the vantage point of personal accounts by young adults and a review of the best evidence that exists on this topic.

What we hope to represent best in this book are both the pain and the hope shown during the period of dissolution and for years later by people in the throes of divorce and dissolution. We try to represent this pain with the accounts of many young people. We believe that if we can learn from this pain, we are making progress in recognizing the long-term widespread impacts of divorce. We can make relationships better. We must work very hard to make them better because the alternative, as documented here, is often devastating to all who are enduring this pain.

But, in addition, this book is as much about hope, strength gained from coping with loss, and resolve to live life honestly and with breadth of understanding as it is about dismay, pain, and hopelessness. The narratives that are reported are balanced in showing hope and pain, often in the same person at different times and even at the same time. These stories tell of how valiantly people struggle to cope in the midst of great interpersonal storms. And, they sometimes are successful. Such stories may serve as models for others facing similar dilemmas.

THE PERVASIVENESS OF DIVORCE

Amato (2010) showed that the crude divorce rate (the number of divorces each year per 1,000 people in the population) more than doubled between 1960 and 1980. Since the early 1980s, the rate has actually declined gradually by 31%. The decline has been attributed to an increase in the mean age when spouses marry and by higher levels of education as divorce rates are lower when spouses marry later in their lives and when they have more education (Heaton, 2002; Martin as cited in Hurley, 2005). Translated into the percentage of people who have ever been married who later divorce, Amato (2010) indicated that this rate approximated 3.5 in 10 in 2006, showing even a small decline since the end of the 20th century. Kreider (2007) found that this rate was never greater than 41% and, consistent with the statistics cited, has declined in recent years (Amato & Irving, 2006). Amato concluded that because a small percentage of marriages end in permanent separation rather than divorce, the common belief that about half of all marriages are voluntarily disrupted is a reasonable approximation.

The substantial increase in the divorce rate through the early 1980s and continued high rates into the 21st century has had many untoward effects on society (Demo & Fine, 2010; Whitehead, 1996). Naturally, societal concern has focused primarily on the consequences for children. Based on U.S. census data, approximately 1 million children each year experience the divorce of their parents. For example, in 2004, divorce affected an estimated 1.1 million children (15 per 1,000 children) (Kreider, 2007). Obviously, a much larger number of children will experience the divorce of their parents at some time before they turn 18 years of age.

While the focus of this book is on children and young adults, it is important to note that divorce also can have detrimental psychological, socioeconomic, and social effects on parents (Braver, Shapiro, & Goodman, 2006; Demo & Fine, 2010), which in turn can exacerbate the potential negative consequences on their children. For example, economically, marital dissolution is hard on all parties, but especially so on women (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002; McLanahan, 1999; Sayer, 2006). The financial hardships experienced by many divorced women, most of whom have either sole or joint custody of their children, can have reverberating effects throughout the family system, including the children.

Although it is obvious that marital dissolution affects the individual members of divorced families, the implications of high divorce rates extend beyond the single family unit to affect such areas as government policy, attitudes and norms regarding marriage and divorce, the provision of mental health and educational services, and society as a whole. In this context of relatively high divorce rates, federal policy has attempted to improve child support compliance rates and to address a number of other political issues relevant to the family (Bogenschneider, 2000; Bogenschneider & Corbett, 2010). In addition, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of mental health, educational, and other professionals working on relationship and divorce issues in the last 25 years, to the point at which divorce-related intervention programs, such as mediation and parent education programs for divorcing parents, have become increasingly popular and often mandated (Blaisure & Geasler, 2006; Fine, Ganong, & Demo, 2010).

THE EFFECTS OF DIVORCE ON CHILDREN

The topic of the effects of divorce on children is in the news regularly and has received much attention since 1980. At holiday times, children may experience some of their greatest feelings of loss because of split families, continued conflict between ex-partners, and the children’s own divided loyalties. Special consideration of children’s needs during these times is an important obligation for divorced parents. As one counselor told the Chicago Tribune (December 24, 2000):

I’m preaching the same sermon I was 20 years ago … and I am still astonished that people don’t get it. … Before you do anything for Christmas, you need to get in your child’s skin and then make a plan. Because what you do now is going to forever influence the way they look at the holidays. (p. C2)

At least in this counselor’s experience, some parents fail to empathize with their children’s plight and do not treat them with the sensitivity that they deserve during these challenging times.

One of the reasons that the effects of divorce on children is a prime, timely topic is because parental divorce is strongly associated with adult children’s divorces (Amato & Booth, 1997), a phenomenon commonly known as the intergenerational transmission of divorce. Amato and DeBoer (2001) found that parental divorce approximately doubled the chances that offspring would themselves divorce as adults.

There is an abundance of literature on the intergenerational transmission of divorce. Factors such as education, income, family and social support systems, and individual attitudes and expectations have been implicated as explaining why offspring of divorced parents are themselves more likely to divorce as adults (Feng, Giarrusso, Bengtson, & Frye, 1999). For example, compared to children from first-married families, children of divorced parents have been found to have lower income and educational attainment, to marry at younger ages, and to be more likely to cohabit prior to marriage (Furstenberg & Teitler, 1994). Amato and DeBoer (2001) concluded that children from divorced families have a higher likelihood of themselves divorcing because they hold a “comparatively weak commitment to the norm of lifelong marriage” (p. 1038). Cherlin (2004) made similar arguments, suggesting that marriage has become less institutionalized over time because people expect higher levels of companionship from their spouses than they did in previous generations and because marriage is now considered to be a means toward fulfilling self-interests rather than the interests of the family.

The types of reported negative effects of divorce on children are diverse and numerous. An August 1999 news story (AP wire story) suggested that teen boys who have had limited or negative interaction histories with their fathers, often in connection with divorce, are at higher risk for smoking, drinking, and illegal drug usage than are teen boys with strong relationships with a single mother. As college teachers, we have seen and heard about the impacts of divorce on college students for over three decades. College students frequently report that they have been placed in the middle of interparental conflict, bitter struggles regarding money, new dating partners, wrongs such as infidelities at the time of their parents’ breakups, and the like.

Compared to children whose parents remain married, children (including adult children) of divorced parents also are more likely to have internalizing behaviors (e.g., anxiety, depression), externalizing problems (e.g., behavior problems), health problems, and poor school performance (particularly dropping out of school) (Amato, in press; Demo & Fine, 2010; Emery, 1999). Adults with divorced parents tend to obtain less education, have lower levels of psychological well-being, report more problems in their own marriages, feel less close to their parents, and are at greater risk of seeing their own marriages end in divorce (Amato, 2010). Despite the reliability of these between-group differences, Demo and Fine (2010) have shown that the differences between groups tend to be relatively small with considerable variability within each group.

In the last decade, a number of popular books on divorce have been published by well-known scholars, such as books by Wallerstein, Lewis, and Blakeslee (2000b) and Hetherington and Kelly (2002). These books have provided data and perspective on the effects of divorce on children and adults. These books are different from the previous writings by these (and other) authors because they were intended for a broader and nonacademic audience. And, as noted further in this chapter, because Hetherington and Wallerstein have quite different views on the effects of divorce on children, their divergent views received considerable national attention in such magazines as Newsweek and Time.

The Hetherington-Wallerstein “debate” highlights a frustrating aspect of the divorce literature—scholars often reach conflicting conclusions regarding how harmful divorce can be on children. For example, Hetherington and colleagues (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002) found that, while there was initial turmoil in the lives of the children, their lives had become more normal by the second year after divorce, and that there were few substantial long-term differences between these children and their counterparts from first-marriage families. By contrast,

Wallerstein and her colleagues (2000b) concluded that as many as one half of the young men and women they studied entered adulthood as worried, underachieving, self-deprecating, and sometimes angry people because of their parents’ divorces.

In an attempt to understand why scholars often reach different conclusions regarding the effects of divorce on family members, Fine and Demo (2000) argued that researchers’ different theoretical perspectives, differing values, different disciplines, and differing training often lead them in divergent research directions and, ultimately, to the generation of different conclusions, sometimes even from the very same data.

A Reapproachment to the Controversy Regarding the Effects of Divorce on Children

How can one make sense of these very different threads in the literature— with some investigators emphasizing long-term pain and sadness and others emphasizing resilience and strength? A synthesis of the literature by Emery (1999) may be helpful in making sense of these apparently disparate conclusions. Emery has proposed five “facts” related to how divorce affects children: (a) Divorce causes a great deal of stress for children; (b) divorce increases the risk (often doubling it, depending on the dimension studied) of psychological problems; (c) despite the increased risk, most children from divorced families function as well as do children from first-marriage families; (d) children whose parents divorce report considerable pain, unhappy memories, and continued distress; and (e) individual differences in children’s postdivorce adjustment are influenced by aspects of postdivorce family life, particularly the quality of the child’s relationship with the residential parent, the nature of interparental conflict, the family’s financial standing, and the nature of the relationship between the child and the nonresidential parent.

According to Emery (1999), some investigators, particularly Wallerstein, focus on the fourth point without adequately considering the others, whereas others tend to minimize the stress and pain experienced by these children and young adults. In a sense, some scholars are limited by only looking at one or two sides of the proverbial multisided elephant. In this book, we attempt to gain a more comprehensive view of the divorce elephant by emphasizing both the pain and the resilience in students’ stories and memories. In many ways, the themes in this book are very much consistent with Emery’s analysis in that we report on numerous aspects of the divorce process and experience, including pain and loss, as well as strength and resilience. Next, we review some of the more important programs of research, and the astute reader will note that there is differential emphasis on the five facts identified by Emery.

THE UNEXPECTED LEGACY OF DIVORCE

Wallerstein and Lewis (1998) reported on a 25-year follow-up longitudinal study of children and adolescents whose families had separated and divorced. The respondents were followed with regular interviews beginning with the decisive separation. Wallerstein and Lewis were reporting on the youngest respondents in the study (now in their late 20s and early 30s). They found that the respondents’ earliest memories when the divorces were occurring were abandonment, terror, and loneliness. Adolescence was marked by early sexual activity and experimentation with drugs or alcohol. The respondents’ early adulthood also was marked by fewer resources for paying for college, fears of intimacy, and strained relationships with their parents, particularly their fathers.

Wallerstein et al.’s (2000b) analysis of the effects of divorce on children created quite a media frenzy. In their book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, Wallerstein and colleagues reported on their three decades of research with children whose parents were divorcing in the 1970s. For these 131 children of 80 California families, a small and not-so-random sample of the 1 million children whose parents divorce each year, the data showed tremendous flux in their relationship lives over the years after their parents divorced. Wallerstein et al. indicated that these individuals whose parents divorced spent much of their early adulthood negotiating relationships. Many were not married or interested in becoming married. Many did not want children. Over one half of those persons studied in the divorced family group had decided at that point in their life not to have children for fear of condemning them to the same difficult childhood they experienced. Wallerstein and colleagues reported that many of their respondents were intensely afraid of being abandoned—more so than adults whose parents had not divorced.

Wallerstein et al. (2000b) found that 40% of adult children of divorce in their sample never married, compared with 24% in the comparison group. About 40% of the marriages had ended in divorce, whereas only 9% of the children from first-marriage families had divorced. However, national data indicated that about 35% of persons from intact families divorce (Amato & Booth, 1997). It is unclear why there was so little divorce, relatively speaking, in the children from intact families in the Wallerstein et al. work, but this finding raises questions about how representative Wallerstein et al.’s comparison group is of intact families throughout the nation.

In Wallerstein et al.’s (2000b) study, children from families in which the parents had reasonably good marriages, or even moderately unhappy marriages, fared far better on most adjustment dimensions than did the children whose parents divorced. They seemed to have a much better idea of what they wanted in a spouse, along with more stability in their close relationships and more clarity regarding the type of family they wished to create. They also seemed to have memories of good models of marriage. They recalled readily how their parents struggled and overcame differences and how they cooperated in crises. These models, in turn, provided guidelines and reassurance for them as they undertook marriage and parenthood.

Some of the common characteristics of adult children of divorce reported by Wallerstein et al. (2000b) are listed in Tab...