Correlates of children's long-term adjustment to their parents' divorce.

Abstract

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...

Correlates of children's adjustment to their parents' divorces

“…We would encourage other investigators to use multiple measures of these dimensions to enhance the reliability of their assessments of children's divorce adjustment. Unlike previous researchers (Fulton, 1979;Kurdek, Blisk, and Siesky, 1981), we did find significant relationships between the measures of children's divorce adjustment we obtained from custodial parents and those we obtained from the children themselves. Differences in the parental measures could account for this relationship.…”

“…"), and friends' reactions to the divorce ("Have you told many friends that your mom and dad don't live together?") Responses were keyed for adjustment, as described in our earlier study (Kurdek, Blisk, and Siesky, 1981), and a total score was derived by summing the. scores on each item.…”

“…Hetherington (1979), Longfellow (1979), and Wallerstein and Kelly,(19gO) have speculated that global age changes in children's divorce reactions are probably caused by specific developmental changes in children's abilities to appraise divorce situations, make sense of complex sequences of events, infer the motives and feelings of their parents, accurately assess their own roles in divorce decisions, and experience some degree of control over outcomes affecting their lives. Empirical support for some of these speculations comes from Kurdek, Blisk, and Siesky (1981). who found moderately positive correlations between children's divorce adjustment, on the one hand, and interpersonal understanding and internal locus of control, on the other.…”

“…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 understood…”

“…As mentioned earlier, Kurdek (1981) has organized correlates of children's divorce adjustment into cultural, social, familial, and psychological contexts. Our final purpose here was to explore the correlates of children's divorce adjustment from the latter three contexts.…”