Children Of Separated Parents Research Articles

Effects of family disintegration on children later depression

Studies examining the effects of marital dissolution on children's welfare have repeatedly found that children of separated parents perform worse on several well-being parameters than those from intact households. Depression is highly represented in the health care system among children and older offspring of divorced parents. This study utilizes the double ABCX model to examine the relationship between divorce and depression. The goal of the study was to see if divorce is a sound predictor of depression. Divorce was shown to only explain a modest portion of the variation in depression (r^2= .04). This level of variation suggests that other than divorce, various additional variables have a role in depression. The study closes with the indication that if additional moderating variables such as the child's maturity and availability of household resources before and after dissolution were encompassed in the analysis, divorce would become a stronger risk factor for depression. Family disharmony may be linked to a higher incidence of severe depressive illness in children of divorced parents.

Prosocial behavior in children of separated parents regarding coping styles

El propósito del presente artículo es establecer cómo los estilos de afrontamiento en niños influyen en su comportamiento prosocial, particularmente en aquellos afectados por el cambio estructural de la familia derivado del divorcio o separación de sus padres. En la actualidad, las estadísticas evidencian el aumento de los divorcios como secuela de la pandemia. El divorcio altera la parte psicoafectiva de los hijos, quienes manifiestan dificultades a nivel académico, cambios de estado de ánimo y de comportamiento, junto a problemas de interrelación con los demás. Asimismo, como cada familia funciona con una dinámica propia, también serán diferentes los modos de afrontar y recuperar la salud emocional, psicológica y social. Apreciaremos la relación de la conducta prosocial y los estilos de afrontamiento en niños de padres separados, teniendo en cuenta que esta se relaciona con la empatía, y consideraremos la influencia positiva o negativa de los miembros de la familia.

Homelife Stressors and Their Long-Term Impact

There are five theories on human development: Psychoanalytic, Behaviorist, Cognitive, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary- all playing a large role in how humans: interact with one another, battle unconscious impulses, respond to stimuli, form concepts, learn values of society, and develop the need to survive and reproduce (Berger, 2017). From a sociocultural perspective, a lot of these traits we learn are more nurture rather than nature. From birth to old age, connections are being made socially and cognitively from sensorimotor functioning levels to advanced formal operational levels. Family functioning is a very in-depth topic that be used to further examine the effects on children as they grow into adulthood. There are certain necessities that must exist in these family homes to insure a healthy development- physically, mentally, and emotionally. However, there are certain life circumstances that can serve as a barrier to a stress-free lifestyle. A few that have been annotated are relocation, divorce, and unemployment (Berger, 2017). All of which are understood to a more sophisticated degree by the parents and can affect their children depending on their child’s age, genes, and gender. It is not until the ages of six to eleven that children start to cognitively apply logic and begin to have a thinking experience from direct experiences. A study was conducted to measure the effects of high-conflict divorce on separating families. The goal was to further understand the level of internalizing and externalizing problems that resulted withing the children of separated parents. The child’s perception was one of the measurement tools that were used to determine frequency of stressful situations that were displayed by the parents and it was concluded that parental quality (PQ) can have an effect on their child’s externalizing and internalizing problems, post-divorce (Hara, Sandler, Wolchik, Tein, & Rhodes, 2019). Several adults were surveyed on their current relationship satisfaction, personal trauma history and other participant data history to further uncover complications that can occur in family homes that may have impact on the family function and the current mental state of these families. There was a total of twenty-two respondents who participated in a ten-item survey.

Moving between home and school, the experiences of children of separated parents; discussions with education professionals

ABSTRACT Parental separation not only impacts on family relationships, it also has implications for a child’s school life and opportunity to learn. However, there is little understanding of how children of separated parents navigate the relationship between home and school. This paper reports findings from discussions with education professionals in English schools about their experience of issues children of separated parents face as they move between home and school. Schools are seen as safe spaces where children who ‘have less supportive home lives’ can access support to promote their emotional wellbeing (DfE, 2018, p13). This study found staff in primary school tended to be knowledgeable about children’s situations, whereas in secondary school, issues came to attention only when parent(s) contacted the school, or through achild’s behaviour. Good parental communication was seen as significant in enabling children to move between home and school with ease. Where parental conflict ‘spilled over’ into schools, staff became aware of the child’s situation but did not always feel able to provide appropriate support. If children wanted to talk about their family situation with someone in school, professionals thought they should have this opportunity but questioned whether staff had appropriate knowledge and skills. The paper considers ways in which staff might support these children through the introduction of awhole school approach, the new Relationships Education curriculum, small group work and work with parents. The framework for understanding children’s accommodation of parental separation was considered auseful tool that could support this work (Kay-Flowers, 2019a).

School Outcomes of Children Raised by Same-Sex Parents: Evidence from Administrative Panel Data

Although widely used in policy debates, the literature on children’s outcomes when raised by same-sex parents mostly relies on small selective samples or samples based on cross-sectional survey data. This has led to a lack of statistical power and the inability to distinguish children born to same-sex parents from children of separated parents. We address these issues by using unique administrative longitudinal data from the Netherlands, which was the first country to legalize same-sex marriage. These data include 2,971 children with same-sex parents (2,786 lesbian couples and 185 gay male couples) and over a million children with different-sex parents followed from birth. The results indicate that children raised by same-sex parents from birth perform better than children raised by different-sex parents in both primary and secondary education. Our findings are robust to use of cousin fixed effects and coarsened exact matching to improve covariate balance and to reduce model dependence. Further analyses using a novel bounding estimator suggest the selection on unobserved characteristics would have to be more than three times higher than the selection on observed characteristics to reduce the positive estimates to zero.

Relationship between food consumption, nutritional status and school performance

Introduction: Adequate feeding during childhood and adolescence is extremely important, due to its act directly on physical and cognitive development.
 Objective: To verify the relationship between dietary intake and nutritional status with school performance.
 Methods: It is an observational, quantitative and cross-sectional study of 134 students aged 9 to 11 years. The nutritional status was measured using the Body Mass Index by age and gender, and food consumption was assessed through the 3-day Dietary Recall. For the knowledge of the school performance, the report cards of 2016 were consulted. A questionnaire was used to collect data regarding the marital status.
 Results: Regarding nutritional status, 59,7% of the students presented eutrophy, 18,7% overweight, 15,6% obesity and 6,0% underweight. The consumption of calcium (p<0,001) and iron (p<0,001) were significantly below the values recommended by the Dietary Reference Intakes. Obese children consumed significantly more lipids (p=0,026) and calories (p=0,003) than the other students. The participation of ultra processed foods represented 35.50% of the total energy value, with a positive correlation between their consumption and the amount of calories consumed (p=0,022) and inverse correlation with zinc intake (p=0,007).
 Conclusion: There was no significant association between dietary intake and nutritional status with school performance, but it was found that the marital status of the parents was associated with student performance, the children of married parents had a higher educational achievement than the children of separated parents.

Parental responsibilities: Reformulating the paradigm for parent–child relationships Part 1: What is wrong with the ways in which we deal with the children of separated parents and how to put them right

ABSTRACTThis is the first part of a two-part article, which calls for the removal of terms such as rights and custody, including joint and shared custody, and visitation from the legal discourse in relation to children and their parents. This part demonstrates how the current discourse, based on the competing rights of the parents, leads inevitably to competitiveness and litigation, which are highly damaging to the child. The proposed paradigm of parental responsibilities requires establishing the needs of the specific child when there are parental disharmony and separation, while emphasizing the joint responsibilities of both parents to ensure that those needs are adequately met. This part also addresses the question: who has parental responsibilities, when a child is born as a result of Assisted Reproductive Technology, and also the quasi-parental role of the court.

Putting Words to the Experience: An Italian Group Intervention for Children of Separated Parents

ABSTRACTThis article presents an Italian group intervention for children of separated parents and describes preliminary findings about its efficacy. After briefly discussing the state of art for interventions of children of separated parents, the core characteristics of the group intervention are explained and each meeting is described. Then, pre–post research is presented to provide empirical support for this approach. Results reported that participation in the group strengthens the social and interpersonal self-concept dimension in the majority of children. Results are discussed considering both empirical and clinical implications.

Should infants and toddlers have frequent overnight parenting time with fathers? The policy debate and new data.

Whether children of separated parents 2 years of age and younger should have frequent overnight parenting time with noncustodial fathers has been the subject of much debate but little data. Contrary to some previous findings, the current study found benefits to both parent-child relationships associated with overnights (a) up to and including equal numbers of overnights at both parents’ homes, (b) for both the long-term mother-child and father-child relationships, and (c) both when children were 2 years old, as well as when they were under 1 year of age. These benefits held after controlling for subsequent parenting time with fathers in childhood and adolescence, parent education and conflict up to 5 years after the separation, and children’s sex and age at separation. While the findings do not establish causality they provide strong support for policies to encourage frequent overnight parenting time for infants and toddlers, because the benefits associated with overnights also held for parents who initially agreed about overnights as well as for those who disagreed and had the overnight parenting plan imposed over 1 parent’s objections. The observed benefits for the long-term father-child relationship are consistent with findings from intervention studies showing that fathers who are more involved with infants and toddlers develop better parenting skills and relationships with their children.

Children Resisting Contact With a Parent Postseparation: Assessing This Phenomenon Using an Ecological Systems Framework

The process of separation and divorce demands significant changes among family relationships requiring the ongoing negotiation of roles and responsibilities. Most children of separated parents will continue to want contact with both parents, but a small subgroup of children will align with one parent and simultaneously resist or reject the other. Several names and etiological suggestions have been coined to label these extreme alignments, but many of these oversimplify the complexity of these strained parent–child relationship dynamics. This article critically reviews the research literature using an ecological systems framework to better understand the nature of these complex strained parent–child relationships. Courts, legal, and mental health professionals that work with these families are encouraged to assess and respond to these dynamics using an ecological approach.

The long-term consequences of parental divorce for children’s educational attainment

AbstractBACKGROUNDIn this paper we study the long-term consequences of parental divorce in a comparative perspective. Special attention is paid to the heterogeneity of the consequences of divorce for children's educational attainment by parental education.OBJECTIVEThe study attempts to establish whether the parental breakup penalty for tertiary education attainment varies by socioeconomic background, and whether it depends on the societal context.METHODSData are drawn from the first wave of the Generations and Gender Survey, covering 14 countries. We estimate multi-level random-slope models for the completion of tertiary education.RESULTSThe results show that parental divorce is negatively associated with children's tertiary education attainment. Across the 14 countries considered in this study, children of separated parents have a probability of achieving a university degree that is on average seven percentage points lower than that of children from intact families. The breakup penalty is stronger for children of highly educated parents, and is independent of the degree of diffusion of divorce. In countries with early selection into educational tracks, divorce appears to have more negative consequences for the children of poorly educated mothers.CONCLUSIONSFor children in most countries, parental divorce is associated with a lower probability of attaining a university degree. The divorce penalty is larger for children with highly educated parents. This equalizing pattern is accentuated in countries with a comprehensive educational system.COMMENTSFuture research on the heterogeneous consequences of parental divorce should address the issue of self-selection into divorce, which might lead to an overestimation of the negative effect of divorce on students with highly educated parents. It should also further investigate the micro mechanisms underlying the divorce penalty.1. IntroductionStudies of the implications of parental separation for children's well-being have consistently shown that children of divorced parents fare worse on different measures of well-being than children living in intact families (Amato 2001; Amato and Keith 1991) 3. While there is ample evidence that divorce has negative implications for children in the short term, there is less research examining the effect on long-term socioeconomic outcomes (Liu 2007). The consequences of divorce for educational attainment may be of special importance as having a poor education may lead to other socioeconomic and health-related disadvantages, and may therefore persistently undermine an individual's life chances (Ross and Wu 1995; Shavit and Muller 1998). Until relatively recently, research linking family structure and children's well-being has not paid much attention to the moderating effects of socioeconomic background (Demo and Acock 1988). Although newer studies of the consequences of divorce have increasingly controlled for social origin, questions of whether and how the long-term parental breakup penalty for children's educational achievement is related to their socioeconomic background are still largely unanswered (McLanahan, Tach, and Schneider 2013). As Amato (2010: 661) put it, on the average effects of divorce masks the substantial degree of variability that exists in people's adjustment. Finally, possibly due to a lack of adequate data, comparative analyses of cross-country differences in the effects of divorce on children are still rare (but see Dronkers and Harkonen 2008; Engelhardt, Trappe, and Dronkers 2002; Lange, Dronkers, and Wolbers 2009; Pryor and Rodgers 2001).In this paper, we aim to fill these gaps in the literature by focusing on the penalty associated with a parental breakup for tertiary education achievement in a comparative perspective. We do so by bringing together insights from two strands of research: studies on the consequences of divorce and family forms on the one hand, and studies on educational attainment and social mobility on the other. …

Su1260 Prevalence of Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders – A Large Multisite Study in Colombian School Children

The prevalence of pediatric functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) in Latin America remains largely unknown. There have been few published studies with small sample size and poor external validity. Aims: To assess the prevalence and risk factors of FGIDS in children in several cities in Colombia. Methods: A large multisite study in school children. The QPGS was translated from English into Spanish with reverse translation into English following validated standard methods by our group. Adequate understanding of the terms used in the QPGS by the children was established. School-children of public and private schools of 7 geographically dispersed mid and large cities in Colombia (Cali, Sotavento, Pereira, Cucuta, Soledad, Pasto, Bogota) completed the Rome III Questionnaire of Pediatric Gastrointestinal Symptoms (QPGS). Sociodemographic, family structure information and medical history were obtained from parents. Anthropometrics were measured and children were plotted into growth curves. Children with a history of an organic GI disorder were excluded. Results: 3483 children were enrolled (mean age, 11.3 +2.2 years). 25.1% school children were diagnosed with FGIDs: 13.2% constipation, 4.9% irritable bowel syndrome, 2.6% functional abdominal pain/syndrome, 1.1% aerophagia, 1.1% abdominal migraine. Females (OR: 1.4 CI: 1.2-1.6), public school (OR: 1.3 CI 1.12-1.57), separated parents (OR: 1.22 CI 1.01-1.48), only child (OR: 1.2 CI: 1.1-1.6) were associated with risk for FGIDs. Malnutrition and growth failure were not significantly associated with FGIDs. Conclusion: This is the first multisite city to investigate the prevalence of FGIDs in Latin American children. FGIDs are common in Colombian school children. Female gender, attending public school, children of separated parents and being an only child were associated with a higher risk for FGIDs.

Child mental health after parental separation: The impact of resident/non-resident parenting, parent mental health, conflict and socioeconomics

Children of separated parents are consistently shown to have greater likelihood of poor mental health than children of intact families. Explanations to date have focused on the impacts of parental conflict, and the role of resident mothers, neglecting the potential importance of non-resident fathers. Using recent data from the longitudinal study of Australian children, this study: (1) compares the mental health of children from intact families with resident fathers to those from separated families with non-resident fathers; and (2) explores predictors of poor mental health among children from separated families. Children from separated families had poorer mental health than those from intact families, but this difference was explained fully by exposure to parental conflict, socioeconomic status and parent mental health, and to a lesser extent by parenting practices. Among children from separated families, the strongest predictor of child mental health was maternal parenting consistency. Policy implications are discussed.

Means and Ends. Why Child Support Money is not Used to Meet Housing Costs

In Australia, as in other jurisdictions, recent legislation and policy addressing child support was introduced as a response to child poverty in single-parent families. However, there has been very little research conducted on the question of how child support money is used by sole parents. This paper extends current knowledge by exploring how— and indeed, if—child support money is a useful resource in meeting the housing needs of the children of separated parents. The study reports on the findings arising out of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 33 parents who received child support money. The impact of child support is often limited by three factors: the amounts paid, the circumstances of its payment (and in particular, unreliable payments), and the values guiding its allocation. The paper argues that ultimately, the benefits of child support are constrained because it is a privatised response to gendered, structural inequalities in housing, care and income following separation and divorce.

Assessment of the Familial Relationships of Young Adult Children of Separated Parents

The aim of this work was the psychometric study of six scales designed to assess the familial relationships of young adult children of separated parents. The analyzed constructs are interparental conflict, loyalty conflict, coalition, parentification, children's perceptions of the parent–child relationships, and young adult perception of the separation–individuation process. Internal consistency and factorial validity was studied through a sample of 535 Spanish young adults from disrupted and nondisrupted families who were between 20 and 30 years old. The confirmatory factor analyses showed a certain acceptability of the original structures of all scales, with Bentler–Bonett Nonnormed Fit Index, Bentler–Bonett Normed Fit Index, and comparative fit indexes above .90 in all cases, and root mean square error of approximation below .05 in the multifactorial scales and slightly higher in the unifactorial ones. The internal consistency values were between .89 and .94 in the unifactorial scales, and between .70 and .92 in the multifactorial ones. The estimations found for the factor saturation supported the acceptability of the original structures. It is concluded that all the scales within this set present acceptable properties, in terms of dimensionality and internal consistency. The limitations are pointed out.

Parental Separation and Children's Behavioral/Emotional Problems: The Impact of Parental Representations and Family Conflict

In this longitudinal study, we examine whether the effect of parental separation on kindergarten children's behavioral/emotional problems varies according to the level of family conflict, and children's parental representations. One hundred and eighty seven children were assessed at ages 5 and 6. Family conflict was assessed using parents' ratings. Children's parental representations were assessed using a story-stem task. A multiinformant approach (parent, teacher, child) was employed to assess children's behavioral/emotional problems. Bivariate results showed that separation, family conflict, and negative parental representations were associated with children's behavioral/emotional problems. However, in multivariate analyses, when controlling for gender and symptoms at age 5, we found that children of separated parents who showed negative parental representations had a significantly greater increase in conduct problems between 5 and 6 than all other children. In terms of emotional symptoms and hyperactivity, symptoms at 5 and (for hyperactivity only) gender were the only predictors for symptoms 1 year later. Our results suggest that kindergarten children's representations of parent-child relationships moderate the impact of parental separation on the development of conduct problems, and underline play and narration as a possible route to access the thoughts and feelings of young children faced with parental separation.

Exploración de la intensidad motivacional para la búsqueda del sentido de la vida en estudiantes universitarios de psicología

This study aims at exploring motivational intensity in the search for the meaning of life, from a logotherapy perspective, in psychology students in a private university in Lima. The sample consisted of 100 students, ages from 18 to 26 years.Three instruments were utilized: Seeking Noetic Goal Test (SONG), a questionnaire of sociodemographic indicators and an autobiographical questionnaire. There were significant differences in scores of children of separated parents and deceased parents in comparison to students who live with both parents. In the qualitative assessment, students showed fear to death, loneliness and their future.

Keeping in touch with children after separation: the point of view of fathers.

The amount of father-child contact after separation is closely linked to the probability that father fulfill their financial obligations towards their children. Determining the factors that encourage this contact is, therefore, crucial to the process of reducing the risk of poverty to which children of separated parents are exposed. Based on data collected from fathers at the 1995 Canadian General Social Survey of the Family, this paper uses multi-level regression analysis to identify factors associated with higher levels of contact between fathers and children, including socio-demographic characteristics of children and fathers, variables associated with attitudes, and fathers' satisfaction with custody and access arrangements.