The Future of Children

Children who experience parental divorce, compared with children in continuously intact two-parent families, exhibit more conduct problems, more symptoms of psychological maladjustment, lower academic achievement, more social difficulties, and poorer self-concepts. Similarly, adults who experienced parental divorce as children, compared with adults raised in continuously intact two-parent families, score lower on a variety of indicators of psychological, interpersonal, and socioeconomic well-being. However, the overall group differences between offspring from divorced and intact families are small, with considerable diversity existing in children’s reactions to divorce. Children’s adjustment to divorce depends on several factors, including the amount and quality of contact with noncustodial parents, the custodial parents’ psychological adjustment and parenting skills, the level of interparental conflict that precedes and follows divorce, the degree of economic hardship to which children are exposed, and the number of stressful life events that accompany and follow divorce. These factors can be used as guides to assess the probable impact of various legal and therapeutic interventions to improve the well-being of children of divorce. Children have always faced the threat of family disruption. In the past, death was more likely to disrupt families than was divorce. Around the turn of the century in the United States, about 25% of children experienced the death of a parent before age 15, compared with 7% or 8% who experienced parental divorce. As a result of the increase in longevity, the proportion of dependent children who lost a parent through death decreased during this century; currently, only about 5% of children are so affected. But the divorce rate increased over this same period, and at current rates, between two-fifths and two-thirds of all recent first marriages will end in divorce or separation. The high rate of marital dissolution means that about 40% of children will experience a parental divorce prior to the age of 16. Although a substantial risk of family disruption has always been present, today it is much more likely to be caused by divorce than by death. Americans traditionally have believed ment of children. Consequently, it was that a two-parent family is necessary for assumed that parental death leads to the successful socialization and developmany problems for children, such as The Future of Children CHILDREN AND DIVORCE Vol. 4 • No. 1 – Spring 1994 Paul R. Amato, Ph.D., is associate professor of sociology in the Department of Sociology, University of Nebraska at