The authors tested a biopsychosocial model in which young adults' long-term relationships with fathers and ongoing distress surrounding their parents' divorces mediated the relationship between disrupted parenting (i.e., exposure to parent conflict before the divorce and up to 5 years after, and amount of time with father postdivorce) and indicators of their physical health. University students whose parents divorced before they were 16 (n = 266) participated. Findings supported the model. The more time children lived with their fathers after divorce, the better their current relationships were with their fathers, independent of parent conflict. The more parent conflict they experienced, the worse their relationships were with their fathers and the more distress they currently felt about their parents' divorce, independent of time with father. Poor father-child relationships and more distress in turn predicted poorer health status. There was no interaction between exposure to parent conflict and time with father; thus, more time with father was beneficial in both high- and low-conflict families, and more exposure to parent conflict was detrimental at both high and low levels of time with father.

Data were collected when children were 42, 54, and 72 months of age (Ns=210, 191, and 172 for T1, T2, and T3, respectively). Children's emotion understanding (EU) and theory of mind (ToM) were examined as predictors of children's prosocial orientation within and across time. EU positively related to children's sympathy across 2.5 years, and T1 EU positively related to parent-reported prosocial orientation concurrently and across 1 year (T2). T2 ToM positively related to parents' reports of sympathy and prosocial orientation concurrently and 18 months later (T3); in contrast, T3 ToM did not relate to sympathy or prosocial orientation. T2 ToM accounted for marginally significant variance (p<0.058) in T3 mother-reported prosocial orientation over and above that accounted for by T2 prosocial orientation. Fostering the development of EU and ToM may contribute to children's prosocial orientation.

There is increasing consensus that the perspectives of children need to be taken into account in decisions made by divorcing parents and the courts and that young adults who have lived through their parents' divorces can be an important source of information about children's perspectives. In this study, the authors assessed the perspectives of 820 college adults from divorced families on the issue of children's living arrangements after divorce. Respondents wanted to have spent more time with their fathers as they were growing up, and the living arrangement they believed was best was living equal time with each parent. The living arrangements they had as children gave them generally little time with their fathers. Respondents reported that their fathers wanted more time with them but that their mothers generally did not want them to spend more time with their fathers.

In 3 studies (N = 188) we tested the hypothesis that children use a perceptual access approach to reason about mental states before they understand beliefs. The perceptual access hypothesis predicts a U-shaped developmental pattern of performance in true belief tasks, in which 3-year-olds who reason about reality should succeed, 4- to 5-year-olds who use perceptual access reasoning should fail, and older children who use belief reasoning should succeed. The results of Study 1 revealed the predicted pattern in 2 different true belief tasks. The results of Study 2 disconfirmed several alternate explanations based on possible pragmatic and inhibitory demands of the true belief tasks. In Study 3, we compared 2 methods of classifying individuals according to which 1 of the 3 reasoning strategies (reality reasoning, perceptual access reasoning, belief reasoning) they used. The 2 methods gave converging results. Both methods indicated that the majority of children used the same approach across tasks and that it was not until after 6 years of age that most children reasoned about beliefs. We conclude that because most prior studies have failed to detect young children's use of perceptual access reasoning, they have overestimated their understanding of false beliefs. We outline several theoretical implications that follow from the perceptual access hypothesis.