Divorce and Remarriage

4/29/22, 3:45 AM 12.3: The Consequences of Divorce for Spouses and Children

https://revel-ise.pearson.com/courses/61fa77549413c45506a8edcc/pages/urn:pearson:entity:da43c185-d9d5-49d7-bd41-696e94e31a94?source=dashboard 1/1

Personal Isolation

For women, the negatives of divorce outweigh the positives. Women oriented toward traditional gender roles especially tend to feel helpless and experience a loss of status associated with their husbands’ identity and status. Divorced mothers who retain sole custody of their children often feel overwhelmed by the demands of full-time parenting and economic survival. The emotional and schedule overloads that usually accompany

solo parenting leave little time for personal pursuits. The result is that divorced women often experience personal and social isolation, especially the feeling of being locked into a child’s world. White women cope less well with divorce than do African American women. Presumably, this is because African American women have better social supports (extended family networks and friendship and church support networks) than do White women (Fine et al., 2005).

Both ex-husbands and ex-wives tend to lose old friends. For the first 2 months or so after the divorce, married friends are supportive and spend time with each of the former mates. But these contacts soon decline because, as individuals, divorced people no longer fit into couple-oriented activities. This disassociation from married friends is especially acute for women, because their child-raising responsibilities tend to isolate them from adult interactions.

On the positive side, women tend to have stronger family and friendship networks than men. These networks provide support, explaining, in part, why women fare better emotionally than men after divorce (Faust and McKibben, 1999). Moreover, because most women receive custody of their children after divorce, they are more connected to their children than noncustodial fathers.

Those few women who give up custody of their children face a two-edged sword. On the one hand they have lost their children, and on the other they face society’s double standard—it is appropriate for divorced men to give up custody of their children, but not for women to let fathers have custody. By giving up their children, these women experience social ostracism and the belief that they are uncaring and unfit mothers.