The influence of parents’ marital quality on adult children’s attitudes toward marriage and its alternatives: Main and moderating effects

Abstract

Drawing on a panel study of parents and children, we investigate linkages between parents' marital quality and adult children's attitudes toward a range of family issues, including premarital sex, cohabitation, lifelong singlehood, and divorce. We hypothesize that parents' marital quality will be negatively related to children's support for these behaviors in adulthood and that parents' marital quality will condition the intergenerational transmission of attitudes toward these issues. We find some evidence that parents' marital quality influences children's support for divorce and premarital sex. More important, our analyses show that parents' marital quality facilitates the intergenerational transmission of attitudes. Parents' attitudes toward premarital sex, cohabitation, and being single are more strongly linked to those same attitudes among their young adult children when parents' marital quality is high than when it is low.Historically, marriage in the United States constituted a unified set of ideas about appropriate adult behavior. Marriage conferred adult status and set the boundaries for sexual activity, childbearing, and living arrangements with a sexual partner. Marriage defined the kinds of work performed by husbands and wives and was viewed as a lifelong endeavor. In recent decades, however, marriage has been largely deinstitutionalized; its meaning is no longer broadly shared, and the package of behaviors that were associated with marriage in the past have become much less closely linked (Cherlin 2004). Behaviors such as premarital sex, cohabitation, childbearing outside of marriage, extended singlehood, and divorce have become much more common in recent years, and they have also become more widely accepted (Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001). The goal of this article is to investigate the ways in which parents' marriages shape children's attitudes about behaviors that conflict with historical definitions of marriage. Understanding the factors influencing attitudes about marriage and family life is important in part because these attitudes have been linked with behaviors such as premarital sex, cohabitation, and divorce (Axinn and Thornton 1992Thornton , 1993Bumpass 2002). We expect that the quality of marital relationships observed by the children of married parents will shape children's attitudes toward the behaviors that have historically been associated with marriage. We also hypothesize that parents' marital quality will condition the intergenerational transmission of attitudes about marriage and its alternatives.

Influences of the family of origin on the timing and quantum of fertility in the Netherlands

“…A potential explanation for the difference in findings between their study and ours is that satisfaction with family life is an evaluative indicator of experience in the parental family, whereas we used more objective indicators. Cunningham and Thornton (2006) found that high quality of the parents' marriage, as reported by mother and child, strengthens intergenerational transmission of attitudes towards marriage. This might also be considered as being inconsistent with our results, but it seems reasonable to suppose that marital quality is more directly related to attitudes towards marriage than to fertility behaviour.…”

“…Duncan et al's suggestion that satisfaction with family of origin leads to a stronger influence of number of siblings on number of children received support from studies conducted in the 1960s and 1970s (Westoff and Potvin 1967;Hendershot 1969;Bumpass and Westoff 1970;Johnson and Stokes 1976), but does not seem to have received much attention in recent literature. However, Cunningham and Thornton (2006) found that attitudes towards marriage and its alternatives were more strongly transmitted from parents to children if the quality of the parents' relationship was high. Studies on intergenerational transmission of age at first birth did not include satisfaction with family.…”

Sibling Similarity in Family Formation

“…Moreover, parents' own family experiences shape parental preferences for their children's family trajectories. Several studies have reported that divorced parents and their children are more tolerant toward nontraditional family forms (Axinn and Thornton 1996;Cunningham and Thornton 2006). However, even though value transmission in families of separation is weaker than in intact families, parental preferences still affect their children's attitudes (van der Valk et al 2008).…”

Changes in divorce patterns: Culture and the law

“…The existing literature in sociology or/and psychology also concludes that growing up in a divorced family can instill less unfavorable attitudes toward divorce in offspring (Amato, 1988;Axinn & Thornton, 1996;Cunningham & Thornton, 2006;Greenberg & Nay, 1982;Kapinus, 2004;Trent & South, 1989). This result may, at least partly, be explained by the intergenerational transmission of attitudes toward divorce as documented by Axinn and Thornton (1996) or Kapinus (2004).…”