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Parental functioning and children's adjustment in families of divorce: a prospective study

Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology - February 1, 1993

This paper prospectively examined relations between marital status, predivorce parenting practices, and children's adjustment, using data from the New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS). Prospective analysis of children's predivorce adjustment indicated that neither boys nor girls showed more problematic behavior prior to parental separation, and only boys had more difficulties after divorce. However, parents of to-be-divorced families reported more difficulties in childcare practices before divorce than did parents of always-married families. Parenting difficulties in to-be-divorced families were found consistently for boys but not for girls. Results suggest that the difficulties found among boys after divorce may be linked with parenting problems that begin before divorce.

Within the last two decades, the divorce rate in the United States has increased substantially. Since 1958, when there were 2.1 divorces per 1,000 population, a gradual increase in the number of divorces has occurred, reaching 2.5 per 1,000 individuals in 1965 and peaking at 5.3 per 1,000 population in 1979 and 1981 (Glick & Lin, 1986). A gradual stabilization in the divorce rate has taken place in the 1980s and 1990s, and a combination of counterbalancing forces makes the probability of dramatic changes in the divorce rate unlikely. Population growth, increases in the employment and status of women, and a high rate of cohabitation outside of marriage are all factors related to higher divorce rates. However, the rising aXe at which people marry, the scacity of eligible women (due to the lower birth rate after the baby boom), and fears about the effects of divorce on children may mitigate any major increase in divorce (Glick, 1989). Based on the dramatic increase of divorces over the last two decades and the prospects that a similarly high number of families will continue to be affected by divorce in the future, it remains imperative to understand the effects of parental separation on children's adjustment.

Previous research on children's adjustment to divorce has found that the transition is a time of upheaval for children as they cope with less frequent contact with the nonresidential parent, strained relationships with the residential parent, and the psychological distress of both their parents (Emery, 1988; Shaw, 1991). Many of the problems children from divorced families experience take the form of externalizing behaviors, with boys generally demonstrating greater adjustment difficulties than girls (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1985), although a range of difficulties and inconsistencies in gender differences has been reported (Emery, 1988).

As research on divorce and children's adaptation has accumulated, there has been a gradual shift in emphasis from family structure to family process. That is, events that accompany marital dissolution, rather than the event of divorce per se, have been identified as potentially more salient correlates of children's adjustment (Berg & Kelly, 1979; Emery, 1982, 1988; Hess & Camara, 1979; Santrock & Warshak, 1979). Longitudinal investigations of divorced families have provided particularly strong support for this focus on family process (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1978, 1985; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980, 1983).

Although longitudinal studies of divorcing families are a significant improvement over cross-sectional methodology, they are not truly prospective designs, since families are recruited after the parental separation. Changes in family process or difficulties in child adjustment that may have begun before the divorce therefore may be erroneously attributed to the parental separation. These possibilities highlight the need for research in which divorce is studied prospectively.

Two issues are especially pressing to address in prospective research. First, the possibility that difficulties in child adjustment are found before the separation must be examined. Second, if difficulties among children begin prior to the parental separation in to-be-divorced families, it becomes essential to examine what factors might be responsible for these difficulties. To our knowledge, no study has been undertaken with the explicit intent of providing a prospective view of children and divorce. Given the high rate of divorce, however, it is possible to use studies of normal child development as prospective investigations of the consequences of divorce for children. Three investigative teams recently have reanalyzed their longitudinal data sets to examine children's predivorce adjustment patterns.

First, Block, Block, and Gjerde (1986) reexamined data from their longitudinal study of normal child development. They found that, as many as 11 years prior to their parents' divorce, children from to-be-divorced families showed more behavior problems than children from always-married families. Analyses revealed earlier and more consistent differences for boys than girls. Boys whose parents would later separate demonstrated a pattern of problematic behaviors at ages 3, 4, and 7, including a lack of impulse control, stubbornness, and restlessness. Girls from to-be-divorced families demonstrated increased behavior problems only at age 4 when compared to their age mates who would remain in always-married homes.

Results of two other prospective studies that began with large nationally representative samples of intact families, the British National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the U.S. National Survey of Children (NSC), also found the "effects of divorce" to be sharply reduced once behavior problems prior to the parental separation were taken into account statistically (Cherlin, Furstenberg, Chase-Lansdale, Kiernan, Robins, Morrison, & Teitler, 1991). Both studies also controled for characteristics such as class and race, and in the case of the U.S. data, whether the mother was employed outside the home. The British NCDS study included all children born in England, Scotland, and Wales during a week in 1958 (initial number of mothers interviewed was 17,414), and assessments used for the divorce analysis occurred when children were ages 7 and 11. The U.S. NSC project was a random-sample survey of 2,279 children ages 7 to 11 with followups 5 years later when children were 11 to 16 years old. In both studies, reductions in postdivorce differences were stronger for boys than girls, though predivorce conditions still accounted for significant variance in girls' adjustment following divorce. For boys, the proportion of variance in behavior problems explained by divorce fell by approximately 50% to a level where differences were no longer statistically significant, even in these large samples. For girls, divorce was still significant for two of four behavioral indices once predivorce behavioral adjustment was taken into account in the British study, but not in the U.S. study.

Given these extremely important findings that many of children's psychological difficulties begin before divorce, it becomes essential to begin to identify the family processes that account for them. However, very little research has addressed the issue of what characteristics might explain predivorce differences in child adjustment. Only Block, Block, and Gjerde (1988) have examined parental characteristics that are related to predivorce child adjustment problems. In the Block et al. (1988) study, parents of to-be-divorced children were characterized by paternal disengagement, maternal resentment, and parental conflict between parents and their sons. These problems in parenting in the predivorce home were interpreted as being responsible for the behavior problems found among children before divorce. In general, relations between predivorce parenting problems and difficulties in child adjustment were stronger for boys than for girls.

The New York Longitudinal Study

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