IMPACT OF DIVORCE ON CHILDREN

Impact of Divorce on Children

IMPACT OF DIVORCE ON CHILDREN

Introduction

Divorce is an inevitable outcome for over half of all marriages today, and every year more than 1 million children in the United States experience the divorce of their parents (Amato & Keith, 1991). Although there is a good deal of inconsistency in the divorce literature, there is general agreement that when compared with children with continuously married parents, children with divorced parents are disadvantaged in several ways, including conduct, psychological adjustment, academic achievement, and close relationships (Amato, 2001). These differences between children from divorced and married families are not large, and many children in divorced families adjust well. Furthermore, recent research suggests that these differences may be due more to factors such as parental conflict and less effective parenting than to the divorce itself, which suggests that there are potential targets for efforts to promote child well-being after divorce.

Impact of Parental Divorce on Children

Much research effort has focused on the differences between children in divorced and married families, leading many to conclude that children from divorced families are behind children from married families on psychosocial developmental tasks (Amato, 2000; Hines, 1997). However, according to a careful review of the divorce research done in the 1990s (Amato, 2001), those differences are statistically small and dependent on how the studies were done.

Conduct problems have been the most frequently examined effect of divorce on children. Many existing studies illustrate that children, especially boys, from divorced families show more aggression, disobedience, demandingness, and lack of self-control than children from married families do. In fact, according to Emery (1999), children from divorced families are overrepresented among delinquents. However, many researchers argue that those deviant behaviors are due to decreased parental supervision following divorce rather than due to divorce per se (Barber & Eccles, 1992). In addition, these findings could reflect preexisting differences in the children prior to their parents' divorce, or could be in reaction to factors such as parental conflict, which may have been present before the divorce.

Research is less consistent on internalizing problems of children from divorced families (Barber & Eccles, 1992; Emery, 1999). Although there are some studies showing that children from divorced families are more depressed and have lower self-esteem than children from married families, many other studies find no differences. In addition, when differences do exist, they decrease over time.

Family Context Following Divorce

Beyond the characteristics and individual strengths of the child, the effects of parental divorce on children may differ greatly depending on the situation of the family before, during, and after the divorce. Five aspects of family context have been identified that can have an impact on children's adjustment following divorce.

Financial Resources

Divorce often leads to a dramatic decline in the economic situation of mothers and children. This reduction in family financial resources is one important influence on the adjustment of children from divorced families, accounting for some of the decline in children's well-being (Barber & Eccles, 1992). Indeed, many studies of the effects of divorce ...