Consideration of current divorce rates leads to the conclusion that an appreciable number of chilclren will be growing up in single-parent-headed households. Hetherington (1979), for example, reports that 40 to 50 percent of children born in the 1970s will spend some time living in a single-parent family. The sheer number of children affected by divorce warrants a close examination of how children's development is affected by dramatic changes in the family system, a:; well as of what factors are involved in optimal adjustment to these changes.The literature relevant both to children's divorce experiences and to factors related to children's divorce adjustment is scattered in journals across the areas of developmental psychology, clinical psychology, family law, social work, and family sociology. Recently, Kurdek (1981) attempted to summarize this information from an integrative perspective. A major premise of this perspective was that children's divorce-related experiences need to be understoodThe authors would like to thank Marilyn Baumer, Nancy Hickey, and Donna Krile for their assistance in data collection and analysis. L. A Kurdek (Ed) Chddrm ond Ilzuorct New Directions for Child De\,elopmen!. no. 19 San Franiisco Jnrscy-Bass. March 1903 47 48in terms of hierarchically embedded cultural, social, familial, and psychological contexts. Respectively, these contexts focus attention on (1) cultural beliefs, values, and attitudes regarding modern family life, (2) both the stability of the postdivorce environment and the social supports available to the restructured single-parent family, (3) the nature of family interaction in the preand postseparation periods, and (4) the child's individual competencies for dealing with stress.While progress has been made in the integration of existing studies on the nature and correlates of children's adjustment to parental divorce, little attention has been directed to the congruence among different sources of information on children's divorce adjustment. Parents typically have provided assessments of children's divorce reactions, while children themselves have not been interviewed routinely. Given evidence that parents and children's sources of information may not be concordant (Fulton, 1979; Kurdek, Blisk, and Siesky, 1981; Wallerstein and Kelly, 1980), our efforts have been directed toward developing self-report divorce adjustment measures for children.How children themselves appraise divorce-related events may be an integral component of their adjustment (compare Dohrenwend and Dohrenwend, 1974). Previous studies of children's divorce reactions (for example, Wallerstein and Kelly, 1980) have identified several areas of concern for children whose parents have separated or divorced. These include children's understanding of divorce as an interpersonal process, their hopes for parental reconciliation, their fears of abandonment, their assignments of blame for divorce, their fears of negative peer reactions, and their negative evaluations of their parents and themselves. These t...

The purpose of this study was to explore children's perceptions of their parents' divorce. One hundred and thirty two children, ranging in age from 5 to 19 years, responded to 13 questions of an open-ended interview; 92 of these children, ranging in age from 10 to 19 years, also responded to a 69-item structured questionnaire. For both measures, interest was directed on the extent to which age; sex; level of lacus of control, interpersonal knowledge, and intelligence; and length of parental separation were related to children's responses. The general tone of children's responses to both measures was positive yet realistic; children did not, in short, view their parent's divorce as an overly distressing experience. This finding supports the validity of the two measures. Moreover, the nature of children's responses was rather consistently related to age and level of both locus of control and interpersonal knowledge in the openended interview, and to age and level of locus of control in the more structured questionnaire. The extent to which children both perceive themselves as having a major cause in their life experiences and understand the dynamics of interpersonal relations, then, significantly influences their perceptions of their parents' divorce.Recently, several authors have attempted to integrate our present knowledge of how children are affected by the loss of one of their parents (Anthony, 1974;Biller, 1976; ~e r z o~ &Budia, 1973; Lamb, 1 g 7 ; ~a g r a b , 1977; Rohrlich, 1977; Shinn, 1978;Sorosky, 1977; Luepnitz, Note 1; Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, Note 2). For the most part, the studies reviewed have dealt with the effects of father absence and point to deficits in children's functioning in the following areas: sex role identity, sextyped behaviors (such as dependency and aggression), interpersonal relationships, and intellectual functioning; in addition, children from fatherless families are thought to be overrepresented in the number of children affected by both psychopathology alid juvenile delinquency.Lawrence A Kurdek and Albert E. Siesky, Jr. are affiliated with the Psychology Department, Wright State University, Dayton, Ohio 45435. Tbe authors would like to thank the children and parents who participated in this study, Jill Tschopp for her assistance in data analysis, and Margaret O'Connor and Anne Stericker for their helpful comments on the manuscript.

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Seventy-four single divorced parents were interviewed about the degree of conflict in the preseparation period, their children's reactions to the news of the separation, their children's present attitude toward the divorce, and their own estimationof thestrengths their children had acquired as a result of adjusting to thedivorce. Attention was also directed to the extent to which parents' responses varied as a function of sex of custodial parent, sex of child, ageof child, and length of parentalseparation.

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