Divorced Mothers: Annotated Bibliography

WHAT IS THE EFFECT OF DIVORCE ON CHILDREN? Annotated Bibliography Children of divorce. (1994, Spring). Mothering, (70), 25+.

Divorce is one of many controversial subjects in family and human development research. What inspired me to critically analyze the article “Does Divorce Create Long-Term Negative Effects for Children?” is the challenge it would be for me to put my bias aside considering I am from a divorced home. After reading the article and analyzing it over and over, I can’t help but think that the writer answering “YES” to this controversial question overlooked many variables and over generalized his findings and research. With Zinsmeister overgeneralizing his research, not considering enough alternate explanations for long-term negative effects divorce, and his lack of relevant information needed to assess reliability and validity are why I find this article to be insightful but not accurate and hope to show why.

The chapter starts with a story about a man in a church who wanted to start a group for divorced people. The pastor said it is a great idea. He asked the other man whether he would like a special section in the auditorium just for divorced people. The man said that would be good. The pastor said that he would have a section for liars, wife-beaters, alcoholics, and others. The man got the message. A healing church must resist the urge to categorize people. A pastor could play the gender or race card, pit the old verses the young, or rich verses the poor. Each could have their own section. “Yet, one of the first, giant steps away from love is to view a person as a representative or a statistic-something other than the unique individual God created.”

4. Making fathers to participate into children’s schoolwork and activities would be an efficient way to get fathers involved. Father involved school counseling program was such a program that required fathers’ involvement. The program was faced to children who experienced parental marital dissolution. However, many problems these divorced fathers were facing also applied to fathers in “doing the best I can”. Fathers from the book and fathers who just separated from kids’ mother were both likely to e wronged by their chidlren. For instance, Jeff in the “doing the best I can” expressed how heartbreaking it was when he heard his daughter told him numerous things that her mother’s boyfriend had done for her. He said “if I give you a million dollars

The second factor I will review is gender. The findings on gender has not been conclusive as some research has shown a more negative effect on boys, while some has shown girls receiving the short end of the stick after divorce. Studies are contradictory because many of them have ended with different conclusions which lead me to believe there is no correlation between gender and post-divorce adjustment, but that’s just my opinion. Kaye (1989) study resulted in that both girls and boys of divorced families equally performed poorer on given test than children with in-tact families. Guidubaldi and Perry (1984) findings contradict those I previously stated by find-ing boys in divorced homes having more adverse effects than girls of divorced homes,

Divorced and loving me. It's hard to let go of your best friend when you've spent the past 15 ? years side by side. My divorce was 1 1/2 years ago. It was hard to depart with her but I signed the papers and I couldn't be happier. I've never looked back. The old me was gone and my best friend no longer had a hold on me. I used to see myself as a person that wasn't beautiful. I'm happy to say today that girl is gone.

Firstly, we can see that my interviewees who are from the higher SES family adjust better to their parents’ divorce, if we take into account financial factor. It is said that divorce means sequences of financial adjustments and obstacle for most divorcing women and men (Demo & Fine, 2010). For higher SES family, losses will be fairly minor, but not for lower SES family. For them, divorce means continued economic hardship. Kat, that is one of my interviewees, lost her financial support, as his father is the only breadwinner in her family. Thus, after her parents were separated, she and her mother have to go through many financial problems. She said that the financial problems led to stress and it made it harder for her to adjust to her parents’ divorce. It is the same happen for Shah that is also from a working class family. Until now, Shah has to work part time to help his mother pay the bills. Both of them also expressed that they had to change houses. They expressed that at that time, these things caused them to have poor academic performance and make them even more stressed out. In contrast, both of my upper middle class interviewees (Jay and Maria) have working mothers (their custodial parent) who

Divorce is becoming all too popular in our society today. When a couple experience tough times or have one too many arguments, they automatically think divorce. Despite its prevalence couples are not prepared for it’s long, drawn out, hurtful process. Divorce does not only hurt the individuals involved, it also affects the children tremendously. While many people don’t think divorce is a bad thing. Hollywood makes divorce look cool and uneventful. When in all reality, it is disruptive. Some people would say that divorce is a lazy way out of a marriage; the cowardly thing to do when a situation presents itself. Divorce is not the only answer to marital problems, in most cases.

This article talks about divorce-stress-adjustment perspective. The article review draws on research that goes all the way back to the 1990s and it basically answers the following questions: What factors mediate the effects of divorce on individual adjustment? Are these differences due to divorce or to selection? How do individuals from married and divorced families differ in well-being? Do these differences reflect a temporary crisis to which most people gradually adapt or stable life strains that persist more or less indefinitely?

Since 2007, parents are co-habitating with partners, and few couples are getting married. A statistic that is taken from the United States Census Bureau, in 2007, 70% of spouses were married and living together. In 2015, 67% of the mothers were not living with spouses. 23% of mothers reported no living with their partner, and 7% of mothers in 2007 were co-habitating and not married. In 2007, 98% of the fathers were married, and the spouses were slowly dropping from 2007 to 2015 (United State Census Bureau).

I personally think this program were more suitable to the fathers in “doing the best I can” compared to divorced fathers. Divorced fathers own more advantages than single fathers, since they had the experience of living with their children, so they might be more skillful than fathers from the book. Moreover, divorced fathers spent more time with children than other fathers. In contrary, fathers in the book were not going to marry with the mothers, they had to get mothers’ permission when visiting the children, and they were not able to spend a lot time with their children. As a consequence, they may not be as skillful as divorced fathers when getting along with children. The program could associate fathers to build their abilities on interacting

In the last two decades divorce has increased substantially leaving couples single and families broken. Divorce is the reality for many families as there is an increase in divorce rates, cohabitation rates, and the number of children raised in step and single marital families. Divorce cannot be overlooked as it negatively affects and impacts youngsters for the rest of their lives. Although it is the decision between two parents’s children are hurt the most in the process. The concept of divorce is extremely difficult for children to understand as there are many unanswered questions and uncertainties. “Will my mom or dad remarry and who will I live with?” are concerns children express while going through divorce. Many

Divorce can effect many things that happened in a person’s life. Many of the research done today focuses on the effect of divorce on work and finances; things that effect a person’s wellbeing for their future. However, not many research done on divorce discusses what happens to the family system in a family as a result of divorce, including the effect it has on the many relationships that make up the family. After researching the affects of divorce on relationships, it has become clear that relationships in the family decline in each relationship that makes up the family. What has not been prominent until now is that these relationships continue to decline as the children of divorced families become adults. The five articles reviewed in this

1. Hymowitz, , Kay S. (2014, February 8). How single motherhood hurts kids. The New York Times. Retrired from http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/.

Women, for instance, undergo enormous pain as a result of divorce. In most cases, law gives divorced women custody. Consequently, they find themselves alone with their children, and hence obliged to look after them in a society where divorced women may be looked in a bad way. Besides, most of divorced women don’t have regular income, as they were financially depending on their husbands before divorce, so they have to work outside home, without neglecting their duties toward their children, and this is very difficult to accomplish especially with the sexual harassment that becomes very common. Emotionally speaking, a divorced woman feels as she was betrayed by her ex-husband .She may also start to hate all men, and this can have direct effects on the way she rises her children.