Divorce and Remarriage

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12.3.4: Children and Divorce Approximately 65 percent of the divorcing couples each year have minor children, resulting in about one million children affected by new divorces annually. This means that about two-fifths of children—one in every three White children and two in every three African American children—by age 16 will experience the permanent disruption of their parents’ marriage. Figure

12.2 shows the percentage of children living in various family arrangements, not all the result of divorce.

Figure 12.2  Historical Living Arrangements of Children: Selected Years, 1880–2009

Source: U.S. Bureau of Census (2011). “Living Arrangement of Children: 2009.” Current Population Report, p. 70– 125 (June).

Most of the children of divorce will remain with their mothers and live in a fatherless home for at least 5 years. Most significant, 10 years after a divorce, fathers will not be part of the lives of almost two-thirds of these children (Weissbourd, 1994:68). Some are twice cursed by the broken relationships of

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their parents—about one-third of White children and one-half of African American children whose mothers remarry will experience a second divorce before the children reach adulthood.

Consequences of Divorce for Children The crucial question is, What are the consequences of divorce for children?

There is clearly the possibility of emotional scars from the period of family conflict and uncertainty prior to the breakup. Children will be affected by the permanency of divorce

and the enforced separation from one of the parents. Most commonly this is separation

from their father. Paul Amato (2010:653), summarizing the results of the research over

decades on the consequences of divorce on children, finds a relatively small but

consistent pattern with children of divorced parents, when compared with children of continuously married parents, scoring lower on a number of emotional, behavioral,

social, health, and educational outcomes. These outcomes, for at least some

individuals, carry over into adulthood, as adults with divorced parents tend to have less

education, have lower levels of psychological well-being, and are at greater risk of

having their marriages end in divorce.

Before discussing the problems that arise from divorce, we must note that the long-term

effects of divorce are difficult to measure (see Researching Families: A New Approach

to Researching the Impact of Divorce on Children). Does divorce actually cause the

problems displayed by children of divorced couples? Could it be that these troubled

children are being raised by troubled parents who eventually divorce (Cherlin, 1999a)?

Hetherington points out that many of the adjustment problems of children are the result

of inept parenting and destructive family relations that were present before divorce and

are not the consequences of divorce (Hetherington, 2002:63). Also, we simply cannot

know how the children from a particular family would have fared if their parents had stayed together. Most important, we do not know what the consequences would have

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been if a couple stayed together in a tension-filled household. Also, we must know that

children with divorced parents are not doomed to be misfits. As Stephanie Coontz says,

[w]hile it is true that children in divorced and remarried families are more likely

to drop out of school, exhibit emotional distress, get in trouble with the law, and

abuse drugs or alcohol than children who grow up with both biological parents,

most kids, from every kind of family, avoid these perils. And to understand

what the increased risk entails for individual families, we need to be clear

about what sociologists mean when they talk about such children having more behavior problems or lower academic achievement. What they really mean to

say is not that children in divorced families have more problems but

that more children of divorced parents have problems. (Coontz, 1997:99)

Note this well: Reviews of the studies on the effects of divorce on children find that “the ’large majority’ of children of divorce . . . do not experience severe or long-term

problems: Most do not drop out of school, get arrested, abuse drugs, or suffer long-term

emotional distress” (Coontz, 1997:100; see Amato and Cheadle, 2005). Put another

way, this time by esteemed family researcher Andrew J. Cherlin:

What divorce does to children is to raise the risk of serious long-term problems,

such as severe anxiety or depression, having a child as a teenager, or failing to

graduate from high school. But the risk is still low enough that most children in

divorced families don’t have these problems. (Cherlin, 2003:1)

Hetherington’s research on 2,500 children found that after a period of initial disruption 75 to 80 percent of children and adolescents from divorced families are able to cope

with the divorce and their new life situation and develop into well adjusted individuals

(Hetherington, 2002:63).

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With these caveats in mind, let us examine the evidence from research according to the characteristics of the children and their families.

Researching Families A New Approach to Researching the Impact of Divorce on Children

Allen Li of the Rand Corporation argues that it is methodologically unsound to compare the

outcomes of children of divorced parents with those of continuously married parents. Instead, his

research compares the behavior of children years before a divorce and their behavior after the

divorce. Only then, he argues, can we tell whether children’s problems after a divorce were a result

of the divorce or a continuation of prior problems resulting from preexisting conditions of the child’s

environment. Li’s data included all children born to a national representative sample of American

women born between 1958 and 1965. These same women were surveyed repeatedly since 1979

and their children since 1988. Some 47 percent of these mothers were divorced by 2002. Li used a

28-item checklist to measure behavioral problems for children between 4 and 15 years of age.

Mothers in each biennial survey filled out the questionnaire. The study included a national sample of

6,332 children. Li found no statistical difference between the average number of behavioral

problems of divorced children and those living with their never-divorced parents. Li states:

It is possible that the dissolution of some marriages decreases some children’s behaviour problems and the dissolution of others increases children’s behaviour problems, so that they cancel each other out, creating the zero effect that I found when I totalled the average effect of divorce. However, for this to be true, one must admit that while certain divorces harm children, others benefit them. My findings contradict the widely-accepted claim that MOST divorces increase children’s behaviour problems and that only a tiny minority of divorces do NOT.

Source: Li, Allen (2008). “The Impact of Divorce on Children’s Behaviour Problems,” Annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families (April 25–26). The paper can be accessed at: http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR489/.

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