Positive Co-Parental Divorce

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

Divorce, a very controversial issue in today’s society, has glaring effects on society as well as individuals. Approximately half of all marriages will end in divorce, resulting in close to one million children per year struggling to deal with the aftermath (Fischer 2007). Parental divorce has been proven to have long-term negative effects on adult mental health (Chase-Lansdale, Cherlin Kiernan 1995). Divorce was at its highest rate in the early 1980s. The first group of children to be affected by these very high divorce rates entered adulthood in the 1990s allowing sociological research to begin on the adverse affects associated with divorce over the span of different ages. Until this time, a lot of research focused on short-term effects surrounding

Co-parenting is important for cognitive adjustment in a child’s development. Co-parenting describes sharing parental responsibility by divorced parents or joint shared custody of a child. The importance of co-parenting involves cooperation, support, and interactions for a successful development. Co-parenting can adjust the child’s development, parent’s cooperation and support are important contributions to a successful co-parenting. According to Feinberg (2010), coparenting consists of four dimensions: 1.) agreement/disagree on issues 2.) work regarding childbearing 3.) supports from both parents and 4.) interactions in the family.

It is during this time a father needs to be present to father, shape and mold his children (Jones, Kramer, Kim A., Teresa L., Armitage, Tracey, Williams, Keith, as cited in Wallerstein, 1980, 1987). On their 10 year follow up, Wallerstein and Kelley found that regardless of the time spent with a father or not, the father continued to be a significant presence psychologically to adolescents, particularly to boys (Jones et al., as cited in Wallerstein, Kelley, 1974). On Kelley and Wallerstein’s 25 year follow up of their now adult participants in their longitudinal study, they have found that the effects of fatherlessness and divorce during their adolescents were long lasting. The participants in the study by Wallerstein et al. (2000) noted that “The impact of divorce hits them most cruelly as they go in search of love, sexual intimacy, and commitment” (p. 299). These same participants also stated in an interview that they had anxiety issues about relationships and intimacy problems into adulthood (Jones et al., as cited in Wallerstein et al., 2000). Wallerstein et al. (2000) participants of the research also stated that they had resentment towards their parents, particularly the fathers who were seen “selfish and faithless” (p. 300).

A major consequence of parental divorce on children is the negative effects on their psychosocial well-being. In his study, researcher Daniel Potter (2010) studied how divorce affects children’s psychosocial well-being and their academic achievement. Taking data from the “Early Childhood Longitudinal Study – Kindergarten cohort” (ECLS-K), his study spanned from the spring of 1999 to the spring of 2004 (Potter, 2010, p. 935). Potter looked specifically at academic levels of Kindergarten, Grade 1, Grade 3, and Grade 5 (Potter, 2010). Out of a total sample of 10,061 children, 870 children had parents who were divorced. Potter measured their psychosocial well-being based on reports that were taken from their

This study is useful for recently divorced mothers as it gives them some more potential insight for how to help their children cope with a divorce, whether through a big brother program to have a positive role model in the child’s life or by giving them access to counselling to express their feelings. One aspect the study could have addressed is if the mother found another significant other and how it would have a further effect on the child. This study focuses interestingly enough on how a parental divorce in adults may or may not have effects on them. Prior to this research, most researchers minimized the effect that a divorce has on adult children of divorce, also known as ACD. This is due to the fact that as adults, they are fully matured and are able to cope much better than if they were a younger child. As well, the

Divorce is a stressful events that can lead to an unfolding of failures to resolve developmental tasks and increase susceptibility to mental health problems and impairment in developmental competencies. Studies has indicate that post-divorce stressors have a more important influence on children's mental health because of stressful interactions between children and their environment as the family restructures following parental separation. However, not every child is affected equally by these stressors, and understanding their differential effects is an important research issue. The strategies that children use to cope are one likely source of children's differential vulnerability to the effects of stress.

Some studies which investigated the impact of divorce on preschoolers’attachment under the mediation of parental style (Nair& Murray, 2005), showed that divorced mothers reported

The change in a family dynamic, such as a divorce, will have a huge impact on a child’s development. During childhood, divorce in a child’s early life is one of the most stressful life events that can occur. Although, all children are not affected, majority of children are more likely to become affected and have a negative impact when it comes to their social and cognitive development. According to Velez et al (2011), “evidence shows that factors such as parental warmth, acceptance, support, family cohesion and firm rule enforcement are positively associated with engagement efforts and negatively associated with disengagement efforts” (pp. 245). At a young age, if children are experienced with a change in their family dynamic, this will lead

More than 1 million children experience divorce each year. In the textbook, Child Development, Feldman (2010) reported that for some children, divorce is an improvement over living with parents who have an intact but unhappy marriage, high in conflict. In about 70 percent of divorces, the pre-divorce level of conflict is not high. Children in these households may have a more difficult time adjusting to divorce. In this paper, I will examine two articles that further investigate pre-divorce conflict and children’s adjustment.

Divorce is never an ideal solution to a problem, but sometimes it’s inevitable. The rate of nontraditional families being the norm is increasing and children are having to learn to adapt quickly to the changing environment and family structure. Children are said to be resilient, but when they are faced with unforeseen negative circumstances they can’t control, it can have an effect on their mind and body. Compared to children living in traditional families, children in one-parent, blended, and step families experienced a higher prevalence of mental disorders, emotional disorders, depression, and lower testing scores (Baxter,

This paper discusses the correlation of children with divorced parents and their ability or inability to have intimate relationships in their futures. In most cases, it depends on the age of the child at the time of the divorce. Studies showed that marital problems, including but not limited to divorce, was associated with negative social, emotional, and physical affects in the children’s lives. Most articles included have different types of specific details, but all generally have the same outcome, being that children with divorced parents love differently than those that have parents happily married. Similar studies surveyed college students and discovered that children with fathers, who divorced and remarried, did not have a close relationship, which made these children more likely to avoid relationships. This literature review discusses the impact that divorce has on children who have or do not have relationships because of what happened to their parents’ relationships.

In the recent years, divorce rates have been continually trending upwards (Reiter, Hjorleifsson, Breidablik, & Meland, 2013). It is factual that children who have parents that have divorced typically face more obstacles in numerous aspects of life than children who have married parents. Children that experience divorce have up to a 300% increase in probability to be impacted by issues in mental wellbeing than their peers without an incident of divorce in their parental structure (Shifflett & Cummings, 1999). These issues can arise due to the various conflicts that may come into play throughout the divorce process, or even the mere experience of parental divorce for the child. The

Children coping with parent’s dissolution have more problem adjusting to life events: “Research on interparental conflict and child adjustment” has shown that parental conflicts that are overt, intense, and child related are more strongly associated with child maladjustment than conflicts that are less evident (covert), intense, and not child related” (Davies & Cummings, 2006; Grych & Fincham, 1990). In a long term consequence, there are chances that they, when growing up, do not believe in marriage, and the risk of them getting divorced is higher than children from an intact family. Children from a divorced family witness interparental conflicts frequently, which shapes their pessimism that marriage problem is unsolvable as well as divorce is easier and acceptable (Cui, Fincham, & Pasley, 2008; Segrin, Taylor, & Altman, 2005). As a relationship is not always about love but it is also about frustration, disappointments and arguments, without patience and efforts from both partners, the connection will not stay strong and healthy. This motivates them to give up a relationship easily, rather than putting effort to work it out. They tend to commit less to their partner. This pattern in adolescent/ young adulthood can predict their rough marriage in the future.

The article examined for this assessment is a quantitative examination of conflict within co-parental relationships post-divorce. The sample used for the study contained 225 divorced fathers. The existence of conflict within relationships beyond divorce is important because it can be used as a predictor of the degree of satisfaction individuals have with their life beyond divorce.