Support and Advice from Married and Divorced Fathers: Linkages to Adolescent Adjustment

Abstract

Parental separation and divorce have become common experiences for children in the United States. For the last three decades, there have been increasing numbers of divorced parent households, and at current rates, 50% to 60% of all children born in the early 1980s will live with only one parent for at least a year before reaching the age of 18 years (Furstenberg, Nord, Peterson, & Zill, 1983; Glick, 1984; Martin Bumpass, 1989). There has been a great deal of variability reported in the experiences of adolescents after parental divorce. For a substantial minority of children in divorced families, adolescence is a period of less than optimal growth characterized by increases in substance abuse, truancy, depression, anxiety, and aggressive behavior, and a decline in academic performance (see Amato & Keith, 1991; for a meta-analysis). However, for many others, it is a time of enhanced responsibility, mature self-reliance, and identification with positive goals and values (Barber & Eccles, 1992). hat characteristics of divorced families are associated with adjustment during adolescence? Despite the profusion of literature on divorce, the focus on the features of the family environment that lead to maladaptive outcomes or successful adjustment for adolescents is relatively recent. Early studies of divorce used a social address approach (Bronfenbrenner & Crouter, 1983), assuming that any adjustment differences were due to family structure. Currently, increasing attention is being placed on using process-focused approaches to explain adjustment differences between family types. In the past decade, processes such as interparental conflict, parent-adolescent relationships, family decision making, and parental monitoring and control have received increasing attention as mediators of divorce effects on adolescent adjustment (Buchanan, Maccoby, & Dornbusch, 1992; Dornbusch et al., 1985; Forgatch, Patterson, & Skinner, 1988; Forehand, McCombs, Long, Brody, & Fauber, 1988; Hetherington et al., 1992; Peterson & Zill, 1986; Steinberg, 1987; Steinberg, Mounts, Lamborn, & Dornbusch, 1991). Most of this process-oriented research has examined the parenting behaviors of the custodial parent. Although frequency of father visitation and its relation to adjustment has been examined (e.g., Amato, 1986; Furstenberg, Morgan, & Allison, 1987), the quality and content of paternal contact, in addition to the processes associated with that contact, have rarely been assessed. In particular, developmentally relevant d mains of father-adolescent relationships, such as discussions about future plans, merit attention in the search for family processes that are predictive of postdivorce adjustment. A further gap in divorce research is that within-group variability of divorced families is seldom considered. This study sought not only to examine whether differences in father-adolescent relationships between two-parent and divorced families accounted for differences in adolescent adjustment, but also to describe within-group variability in postdivorce fathering and in adolescent adjustment. Divorce and Adolescent Adjustment Divorce has been implicated in several areas of child and adolescent maladjustment, including social, emotional, behavioral, and scholastic problems (Amato & Keith, 1991). The negative effects of divorce are most common around the period of the divorce, and many children and families recover from the initial distress and resume normal functioning within a few years (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1982). However, a substantial number of adolescents in divorced-mother families remain at a disadvantage even 4 to 6 years after the divorce when compared to their peers in two-parent families, particularly in the areas of self-processes and internalizing problems (Allison & Furstenberg, 1989; Hetherington et al., 1992). These two domains are briefly examined below. Self-processes. …