[Author Affiliation]Stephen T Mennemeyer, Department of Health Care Organization and Policy, 330 RBPH, School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294-0022, USA; smenneme@uab.edu; corresponding authorBisakha Sen, Department of Health Care Organization and Policy, 330 RBPH, School of Public Health, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL 35294-0022, USA; bsen@uab.edu[Acknowledgment]We are grateful to editor Julie Hotchkiss and two anonymous referees for many excellent suggestions. The responsibility for all errors is ours.... children don't need their parents to like each other. They don't even need them to be especially civil. They need them to stay together, for better or worse.... Physical abuse, substance addiction and other severe pathologies cannot be tolerated in any home. Absent these, however, Wallerstein stands firm: a lousy marriage, at least where the children's welfare is concerned, beats a great divorce.11. IntroductionHow do the structure of a family and the quality of parental relationships relate to the behavior of children? Extant literature has consistently found that parental divorce and/or the absence of fathers from a household are correlated with numerous undesirable outcomes for children, including lower educational attainment, emotional problems, substance use, participation in undesirable activities, and other problematic outcomes.2 The correlation persists even after controlling for factors such as household income, indicating that remedies such as better enforcement of child support or enhancement of the single-parent's income by other methods will not suffice to counter the negative outcomes for children.It is tempting to infer from the above findings that one way to reduce negative outcomes for children is to make divorce between parents more difficult. In contrast, proponents of no-fault divorce have argued that unhappy marriages should be dissolved easily because neither parents nor children benefit under such a situation. Indeed, survey results reported by the BBC in November 2000 found that 64% of surveyed adults believed that for children, divorce was preferable to living with permanently squabbling parents.3 However, opponents have countered that household structure matters for children because they need supervision and guidance from both parents (and that stepparents are typically poor substitutes). In the highly publicized and controversial book The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce (2000), Wallerstein (a therapist and retired lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley) and her coauthors make the argument that an intact marriage is beneficial to children, regardless of the quality of parental relationships.While the work of Wallerstein et al. has been criticized for a lack of methodological rigor and although the nonrandom nature of the authors' sample prevents generalization of their findings,4 the authors' assertions draw attention to the fact that there remains a dearth of studies that compare outcomes for children in divorced families versus children in intact families in which the quality of the parental relationship is poor. There are obvious problems with comparing the behavior or outcomes of children from divorced families with those of families that choose to stay together, presumably because the marital relationship is harmonious, and then attributing the differences to family structure. Ideally, one would like to compare the outcomes for children belonging to a divorced household with those of a control group of children from an unhappily married household in which the parents are prevented from getting divorced because of purely external reasons. Failing this, it is still useful to try to disentangle, to the degree possible with existing data, the separate effects on child behavior of household structure and the degree of harmony among the adults therein. …
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Open Access
Nov 27, 2023
Minjeong Shin + 1
