Marital Happiness of Parents and Their Children's Attitude to Marriage

Abstract

PERSONS reared in present day urban America are exposed to a number of experiences which contribute to their conception of marriage, and influence their evaluation of marriage as a relatively desirable or undesirable status for themselves. Most of these experiences are vicarious: exposure to the representations of marriage in print, movies, the radio and television. Less vicarious is the learning of the risks of marital failure as epitomized by the divorce rate. But marriage is also very directly depicted and defined for the young by the marital relationship of their parents. It is in the home that they first and most continuously encounter marriage, not as a fiction or concept but as embodied in the behavior of their fathers and mothers with and toward one another. Apart from the picture of marriage which the child may build out of inferences from the parents' behavior one or both parents may wittingly attempt to indoctrinate the child with a conception of marriage as one of the great joys of adulthood or as a status to be warily approached if not altogether avoided. For the majority of the young, one of the probable major effects of their vicarious learning about marriage is that it is made to appear a highly attractive and desirable status. (And they lived happily ever after.) If this evaluation is not materially influenced by knowledge of the divorce rate it is still subject to some reality testing in that the child has intimate knowledge of the union of his parents, if of no other adults. To the extent that marriage as thus directly known is perceived as a highly satisfying experience the vicariously assimilated conception is reinforced or at least not contradicted. But insofar as the relationship of his parents is seen by the child as fraught with conflict and unhappiness his conception of marriage as a desirable goal may be challenged and his enthusiasm for marriage diminished.' Favorableness of attitude to marriage is a variable of theoretical interest for a number of reasons. It may be important in accounting for individual differences in age at marriage. It may be associated with individual differences and sex differences in patterns of courtship and mate selection. And it may be related to marital success. If, as hypothesized above, favorableness of attitude to marriage varies with parental happiness, the former may be one of the intervening variables in the oft-noted correla-tion between the marital happiness of parents and that of their offspring. The research reported below was concerned with testing the hypothesis of a positive association between the marital success of parents and the favorableness of their children's attitude to marriage. Since data were secured from men and women subjects it was also possible to test the widely-held assumption that in our society the unmarried female views marriage more favorably than does the male.