DIVORCE

Divorce Rates and Demographics

Divorce rates in the United States showed an upward trend from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, rising from 0.3 divorces per 1,000 people in 1867, the first year for which national data are available, to a peak of 5.3 per 1,000 people during the period from 1979 to 1981. In the 1980s the divorce rate stabilized and began trending downward, with a figure of 4.4 divorces per 1,000 people recorded for 1995. It is projected that approximately one-half of the first marriages of the baby boom generation will end in divorce but that the rate will decline to 40 percent for the generations that followed the baby boomers. The median length of a first marriage that ends in divorce is eight years, and three out of four men and two out of three women remarry. Divorce is a more likely outcome for second marriages; approximately 60 percent end in divorce after a median length of five to six years.

Several factors increase the probability of divorce. Briefly, divorce rates are almost twice as high for black as for white families, two to four times higher for individuals who marry while in their teens, about 50 percent higher for couples who lived together prior to marriage, and about 25 percent higher for individuals whose own parents were unmarried at their birth or whose parents were separated prior to the individual turning sixteen. Higher education levels are related to lower divorce rates, which is due in part to the tendency for more highly educated individuals to marry later and to have been raised in intact families. Families with one or two children are less likely to divorce than those without children or those with more than two children. Divorce rates in families with a pre-school child are about half of those for childless families and lower than those for families with school-age children; however, this protective effect may be limited to firstborns. Thus, the likelihood that a child will experience a divorce depends on a number of social and demographic factors.

Impact of Divorce on Children

Researchers have consistently found that children from divorced families score significantly lower on a variety of indexes of well-being compared to children from two-parent families. An analysis of ninety-two studies involving 13,000 children found, however, that the differences are small, ranging from .08 of a standard deviation for psychological adjustment (e.g., depression, anxiety) to .23 for conduct problems (e.g., aggression, delinquency). Intermediate-sized differences were found for academic achievement (.16), social adjustment (.12), and self-concept (.09). Similar differences emerged across thirty studies conducted in the 1990s.

These findings may not appear to justify the strong public concern expressed about the harmful effects of divorce on children. But despite these small differences, some children experience serious problems following parental divorce. For example, in large nationally representative samples, researchers have found that children whose parents divorce are twice as likely to see a mental health professional compared to children from two-parent families. But receipt of mental health services may over-or underestimate psychological problems. It is therefore worth noting that on a widely used measure of child adjustment, approximately 20 percent of boys and 25 percent to 30 percent of girls who had experienced parental divorce showed clinically significant problems compared to approximately 10 percent of children from two-parent families. These data show that children from divorced families are at risk for serious problems but that resilience is the most common outcome. In fact a handful of studies even document positive outcomes for children when their parents divorce.

How a Child's Age Affects Divorce's Impact

Various theories of child development suggest that children younger than age five or six are particularly vulnerable to the effects of parental separation. The disruption of attachment relations, combined with the child's limited cognitive abilities to understand divorce, is central to this vulnerability. Although most children are young when their parents separate because divorce risk is greater earlier in marriage (of all children who experience divorce by age twelve, 66% experience it by age six), preschoolers and infants are the least studied groups in the divorce literature. In fact, data on developmental differences in response to parental separation are surprisingly limited.

The ninety-two-study analysis described earlier found roughly equal differences among children in preschool, elementary school, and high school for most outcome measures. But analyzing studies that assess children of different ages at a single point in time confounds children's age at the time of divorce with the amount of time elapsed since the divorce, both of which could account for the results. Data from a large, nationally representative sample of children have been used to avoid this problem. These data demonstrated that children showed greater adjustment with increasing age (e.g., birth to age five, age six to ten, age eleven to sixteen), with the youngest age group being the most severely affected by divorce. Importantly, however, age differences were statistically significant on only one of the nineteen measures used. In sum, robust age-at-separation effects, such as gender effects, have not been empirically demonstrated. Clinical observations, however, show that children's concerns resulting from parental separation and how they express their concerns do vary with age.

Although on average, children from divorced and continuously married homes differ, more striking is the considerable overlap in the distribution of functioning in these two groups. Perhaps the most salient feature found through research is the individual variability in the impact of divorce on children. To gain a deeper understanding, one therefore must go beyond group comparisons to investigate the time course, moderators, and mediators of children's adaptation after divorce and clearly recognize that divorce is a process that begins prior to the physical separation of parents and may continue long after. Although the separation may be the single most salient event in the divorce process for children, it represents just one of a long series of events that may challenge their adaptation; the nature and number of events as well as what children bring to them is likely to account, in part, for the variability in child outcome.

Time Course of Children's Adaptation to Divorce

It is common for children to experience sadness, anxiety, anger, sleep disturbances, and other symptoms in the months following a parental separation. Indeed, for the first one to two years after divorce both boys and girls tend to show subclinical behavioral and emotional distress and are likely to be more oppositional, do more poorly in school, and have difficulties getting along with peers. After this "crisis" period abates, however, adjustment problems tend to decline but the gap in psychological well-being between offspring in divorced and continuously married families remains and may increase over time. Indeed, parental divorce continues to affect individuals into adulthood and is associated with multiple problems, including marital distress, low socioeconomic attainment, and poor subjective well-being. Individuals whose parents divorce are also more likely to get divorced themselves, which may reflect difficulties in developing satisfying interpersonal relationships or simply a greater tendency to see divorce as a viable option when marital difficulties arise. It is possible that divorce shapes children's attitudes and expectations about close relationships, which in turn influence their behavior in these relationships.

Variables That Moderate and Mediate the Impact of Divorce on Children

Many variables mediate or moderate the impact of divorce on children, including a conflicted relationship with a parent (especially the custodial parent), inept parenting, postdivorce economic hardship, interparental conflict, inadequate social support, and the number of negative life events experienced (e.g., moving, changing schools). Children who use active coping (e.g., seeking social support) and who do not blame themselves for the separation adjust better than those who cope via distraction or avoidance or who engage in self-blame. An analysis of sixty-three studies suggested that contact with non-custodial fathers who exhibit authoritative parenting is related to beneficial child outcomes. There is mixed evidence on whether parental remarriage benefits children.

Ameliorating the Impact of Divorce on Children

Access to therapeutic interventions, especially school-based support programs, is associated with improved postdivorce adjustment. Perhaps the greatest effort to help children has occurred through programs targeted at parents. A growing number of states are offering (or mandating) education or mediation programs for divorcing parents. Divorce mediation leads to speedier dispute resolution, greater compliance in payment of child support, and greater involvement of the father in the children's lives. Although parties who participate in mediation and in education programs tend to be satisfied with them, there is little evidence to suggest that they benefit children. But absence of evidence is not equivalent to evidence of absence. Evaluation research is acutely needed to improve the efforts to help children whose parents separate.

See also: CHILD CUSTODY AND SUPPORT; MEDIATION

Bibliography

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Frank D. Fincham