Marital Change Research Articles

Depression following marital problems: different impacts on mothers and their children? A 21-year prospective study

With increased rates of marital breakdown it is important to identify the long-term mental health outcomes of marital problems and marital change for mothers and their children. Of particular interest is the possibility that mothers may benefit from leaving a relationship, but their children may not. This study examines the effects of marital quality and marital change on symptoms of depression in mothers and their children over 21 years. Data (3,512 mothers and 3,334 children) were from Mater-University of Queensland Study of Pregnancy (MUSP), a population-based birth cohort study, which commenced in Brisbane, Australia, in 1981. Mothers and children were followed up at birth, 6 months and 5, 14 and 21 years after the initial interview. Marital status and marital quality were assessed at 5 and 14 years. Symptoms of depression were assessed in mothers and children at the 21-year follow-up. A poor-quality marital relationship at the 14-year follow-up was associated with increased symptoms of depression in both mothers (+3.3 symptoms) and children (+1.1 symptoms) 7 years later. Symptoms of depression in the mother improved if she changed to unpartnered status (-1.31 symptoms); however, children experienced an increase in depression (+1.30 symptoms). There was a substantial increase in mothers' depression (+3.9 symptoms) associated with a poor reconstructed relationship but no change for children (0.68). Marital transitions may improve symptoms of depression in the mothers but not in their children. Clinical decisions for families living in some difficult marital relationships need to take into account the association between maternal and child mental health particularly evidence from clinical samples that remission of depression in the mother improves outcomes for the child.

From Partnership to Parenthood: A Review of Marital Change Across the Transition to Parenthood

The transition to parenthood is generally seen as one of the most challenging events in the early stages of marriage. But is it really that detrimental for marriage and do all couples go through the same changes? This article provides a state‐of‐the‐art review of research on marital change across the transition to parenthood. I first address to what extent the transition to parenthood affects the partner relationship. I then consider factors that explain why some couples fare better or worse than others across the transition to parenthood. Two factors that play a central role are (1) adaptive processes and (2) personal and situational characteristics. Finally, this article builds an evidence‐based case for an integrative model of the transition to parenthood.

Disruptive and Oppositional Behavior in an 11-Year Old Boy

Tony is an 11-year old boy in the fifth grade whose mother describes him as "really a good kid who is bright and tries to be friendly. But he's always doing things that get him in trouble at school and sometimes at home." Tony was diagnosed with ADHD (combined type) 2 years ago. Stimulant therapy improved his attention and concentration during school, decreased hyperactivity in the classroom and improved educational achievements. However, Tony is oppositional and disruptive on the playground, during team sports and at home. His teacher observed that he wants to fit in, but he quickly gets in arguments with other children. He has difficulty sustaining friendships because he typically annoys others with unreasonable demands. He often has temper tantrums when things do not go his way; the tantrums are not prolonged but frequent. At home, on several occasions Tony hit his younger sister, and he once threw a dinner plate against the wall during a family meal. Although his mother describes these behaviors as present for many years, they seem to be escalating. Tony lives with both parents and his younger sister. There is no history of marital discord or major life event change in the past year. Standardized achievement tests demonstrate average to above average achievement scores. He continues to get mostly B grades and an occasional C. Tony's parents have tried to limit television time as a punishment for disruptive behaviors without any apparent effect. His mother reports that she yelled at him on several occasions when he refused to carry out household chores. "He gets angry at the simplest request for help." After meeting with Tony and his mother and completing a normal physical examination, the pediatrician referred Tony to a child psychologist for behavioral therapy.

What's in a Name? 361.708 Euros: The Effects of Marital Name Change

This article has been retracted.

Gender Dynamics and Role Adjustment During the Transition to Parenthood: Current Perspectives

This review of recent literature addresses the issues of marital change across the transition to parenthood, the process of redefining gender roles, the division of labor in the family, striving for equally shared parenting, and the struggle to maintain egalitarianism after the birth of a child. Furthermore, this article also provides practice-related implications for practitioners, an inclusive term that includes family life educators, couple and family counselors and therapists, social workers, family service agency personnel, home health aides, and others working with couples and families.

The recent marital transition in Bulgaria between historical diversity and Pan-European integration

This paper deals with the development of family dynamics in Bulgaria with particular emphasis on the transformation in individual marital behaviour observed since the early 1990s. First, a brief overview of the development of nuptiality over the last century is provided, which establishes the stability of important features associated with the eastern European marriage pattern. The recent marital changes in the country are then discussed in the context of an evolving Second Demographic Transition, which challenges the last remnants of the eastern European marriage pattern and proceeds as an integrative trend toward the plurality of family forms observed within and between European countries. Special attention is directed towards the urban–rural differences in the development of the recent marital transition in Bulgaria. These differences are analysed from the perspective of the subjective preconditions associated with the change or stability of particular values and world-views related to marital life. The analysis shows that in Bulgaria during the 1990s it was the big cities that tended to be innovative centres, disseminating the new familistic values and behavioural patterns that facilitated the development of new marital trends. Conversely, the towns and villages tended to be places in which traditional values were stronger and prevailed for longer. These values, along with some structural factors, maintained the more traditional marital profile of the rural areas for longer.

Marital satisfaction across the transition to parenthood.

The purpose of the present study was to discriminate between the 2 dominant perspectives governing research on the nature of marital change over the transition to parenthood. Progress can be made in understanding this transition by recognizing the role of uncontrolled sources of variability in research designs, defining and using control groups, and timing of data collection around the child's arrival, and the authors conducted a study incorporating these methodological refinements. Growth curve analyses were conducted on marital satisfaction data collected twice before and twice after the birth of the 1st child and at corresponding points for voluntarily childless couples (N = 156 couples). Spouses who were more satisfied prior to pregnancy had children relatively early in marriage, and parents experienced greater declines in marital satisfaction compared to nonparents. Couples with planned pregnancies had higher prepregnancy satisfaction scores, and planning slowed husbands' (but not wives') postpartum declines. In sum, parenthood hastens marital decline--even among relatively satisfied couples who select themselves into this transition--but planning status and prepregnancy marital satisfaction generally protect marriages from these declines.

Longitudinal Changes in Marital Relationships: The Role of Offspring’s Pubertal Development

This study charted the longitudinal trajectories of wives’ and husbands’ reports of marital love, satisfaction, and conflict and explored whether and how first‐ and second‐born offspring’s pubertal development was related to marital changes. Data were drawn from the first 7 years of a longitudinal study of family relationships. Participants included wives, husbands, and first‐ and second‐born children from 188 White, working‐ and middle‐class families. Multilevel models revealed declines over time in wives’ and husbands’ reports of marital love and satisfaction but only small changes in conflict. Offspring’s pubertal development was related to changes in marital qualities; declines in positivity and increases in negativity were most consistently linked to firstborns’ puberty. Overall, the results highlight the interrelatedness of family subsystems.

Keeping Women in Their Place? Spousal Influence, Vote Choice and Changing Marital Dynamics in Japan

ABSTRACT Rural to urban migration in postwar Japan contributed to malapportionment, resulting in the inflation of seats won by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) whose traditional stronghold is rural Japan. The support of older, rural women socialized prior to the war and suffrage is considered central to the party's continued dominance, offsetting the concentrated vote of young, urban women. Conventional wisdom holds that women's voting patterns, particularly those of older, rural women, are influenced by husbands who are likely LDP supporters. This article uses survey data to test for patterns of influence and marital congruence amid rapid demographic changes that promise to undermine the strength of marriage as a traditional agent of adulthood political socialization.

Marital status and psychological well-being of Filipino women.

In the last four decades studies on womens well-being have gained considerable attention across different disciplines. In the 1980s investigations into various indicators of psychological well-being started to proliferate and the impetus for almost all of these studies is the hypothesized link between psychological health and physical health. A number of these researches look into the relationship between psychological well-being and major life transitions including marriage. However most of the studies on marital transition and psychological well-being were conducted in the developed country setting. In the developing countries few if any such studies exist. In particular nothing is known about the association between separation widowhood and remarriage with womens psychological well-being in the Philippines. To address this gap in literature this paper aims to: 1) examine the types and prevalence of marital status changes for a sample of Filipino women and 2) explore whether and how current marital status relates to psychological well-being. This study is timely and crucial because the Philippines is presently confronting issues that tend to undermine the traditional institution of marriage such as the proposal to legalize divorce in the country. (excerpt)

Umberson, Debra. DEATH OF A PARENT: TRANSITION TO A NEW ADULT IDENTITY

Umberson, Debra. DEATH OF A PARENT: TRANSITION TO A NEW ADULT IDENTITY. Cambridge University Press, 2003, hardcover, 255 pages. ISBN#0-521-81338-7I remember when my mother-in-law called us one night to tell us that my husband's father had suffered a heart attack and might not make it through the night. I took the phone call and remember the oddest feeling: that my husband and I would be alone in the world, without Mac to turn to for advice and guidance, and that we were graduating up a generation and would be the ones on whom others would depend. I was amazed that these feelings flooded through me. Having read Umberson's book, I have begun to understand much more about how normal those feelings are.I loved this rich and deeply thought-provoking book on the impact of the death of a parent. The book looks at normative grief [although one parent in the book was murdered] and how the entire family dynamic is altered by the death of a parent. This major, albeit anticipated, change in our lives can have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on middle-aged adult children. The death of a parent can, in fact, represent a turning point in our emotional, social, and personal lives, to say nothing of how we see ourselves and relate to the rest of the world.Umberson has based her book on a massive qualitative/quantitative study with groundbreaking research, very in-depth interviews, and data collected nationwide. She points out that adult children, even 50 or 60 years old, are far from being finished beings. In fact, the death of a parent can trigger enormous personal and marital changes for the adult child. The death of a parent can initiate profound changes in the child, in beliefs, behaviors, self-views, goals, careers and the sense of oneself. We are transformed, whether for good or for bad, for the rest of our lives by the death of a parent.Umberson is Professor and Chair of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. The research for this book was supported by a FIRST Award from the National Instituted on Aging. As a former social worker, Umberson has worked with terminally ill patients and their families. She is the author of 36 articles and chapters on family relationships and health. She lectures on issues of death and dying at the University of Texas.As Umberson points out, adults expect their parents to precede them in death; nonetheless, the death of a parent, even following a long illness, is still a shock. Even ordinary adults [those without mental health or instability problems] can be very strongly affected by the death of a parent. The death of a parent signals an important turning point in the lives of adults, with changes to how we view ourselves, our marriages, our own children, our jobs, our priorities, and our own future deaths.The central message of this book is that it is quite common for the death of a parent to have a profound effect on ordinary adult children. These changes can affect our interpersonal relationships, our work, behaviors, social roles and how we view ourselves. For some adult children, the loss is keen and persistent while for others the loss is freeing if the parent has been hyper-critical throughout one's life. Society tends to acknowledge other important rites of passage....birth, marriage....but not the death of a parent, every bit as important a rite of passage, one which changes forever how we relate to the world around us. Umberson points out that the process of ending one phase of life [being an adult child with two parents] and beginning a new one [becoming motherless or fatherless or both] creates upheaval for most people. In this final transition into adulthood, the death of a parent provokes a period of intense self-reflection and an important transformation of adult identity. The death of a parent, as Umberson found in her research, is a life-altering, if little understood, experience for most. Interestingly, Umberson found that Although gender differences in the experience of parent loss are a consistent theme throughout this book, the national data reveal that the effects of the loss on mental health, physical health, and relationships rarely differ on the basis of race, socioeconomic status, or the age of adults. …

Changes in maternal marital status are associated with young adults' cannabis use: evidence from a 21-year follow-up of a birth cohort

Relatively little is known about why almost half of young adults in Australia have used cannabis. Because the upwards trend in use of cannabis has been coincident with an increase in marital breakdown, this study examines the relationship between marital status, marital changes, and the onset of cannabis use. Data are from the Mater-University Study of Pregnancy (MUSP), a 21-year prospective study in Brisbane, Australia. The present study is based on the 3008 mothers and their children for whom there were complete follow-up data at 21 years. Outcomes were self-reported cannabis use at age 21 and early onset (before age 15) cannabis use as judged from a retrospective report obtained at 21 years. Analyses were conducted using multivariate binomial and multinomial logistic regression. Change in maternal marital status when the child was aged between 5 and 14 years was significantly associated with increased risk of cannabis use [odds ratio (OR) = 1.7; 95% confidence interval (95% CI) 1.4-2.0 for one or two marital changes and OR = 2.3; 95% CI 1.5-3.4 for three or more marital changes], after adjustment for a range of potential confounders. Experience of changes in maternal marital status in mid- to late-childhood is a significant predictor of subsequent and early use of cannabis by the child. This holds true even after allowing for certain possible causes and consequences of marital breakdown.

Marital transitions and mental health: Are there gender differences in the short-term effects of marital status change?

Although there has been evidence to suggest that women exhibit more vulnerability to psychological distress than men when they lose a spouse or remarry, knowledge about the process by which men and women adjust to marital change remains fragmentary. This is due in part to the length of time between observations in longitudinal studies on marital change, with the result that mental health status is typically assessed long after a marital status transition has occurred. The purpose of the current study is to test for gender differences in the short-term mental health effects of a marital status transition using three waves of data collected at two year intervals in a Canadian population health survey ( N = 11 , 155 ). Growth curve analyses confirm the mental health advantage of marriage and reveal that the short-term effects of moving into and out of marriage on psychological distress are similar for men and women. We discuss the implications of these findings for resolving competing explanations regarding psychological adjustment to marital change.

Marital Changes During the Transition to Parenthood

Marital Changes During the Transition to Parenthood

Living the burden in becoming a family caregiver for a cerebrovascular accident survivor: knowledge analysis

This bibliographical research aims to carry out a thematic analysis of knowledge production in periodicals, about the burden placed on family caregivers of Cerebrovascular Accident (CVA) survivors. The analysis gathered articles found in the 80 and 90, through the Medline, Lilacs and Cinahl databases. The content analysis was the methodological background that enabled us to organize the whole knowledge into a body of categories and subcategories, called: Category 1 - The sequels of the CVA creating burden, Category 2 - Aspects generating burden, covering the following subcategories: social isolation, marital changes and dissatisfactions, family caregivers' financial difficulties and deficits in their physical health and self-care, Category 3 - Other analyses about burden in CVA survivorś family caregivers.

Marital Timing and Marital Assimilation Variation and Change among European Americans between 1910 and 1980

Most studies of the intersection of marriage and ethnic assimilation focus on partner choice rather than marital timing as an indicator of immigrant adaptation. Yet whether or when immigrant groups assumed an “American” marriage pattern can shed light on the nature of immigrant adaptation, its pace, and completeness. The authors examine ethnic differences for European Americans in the marriage timing of select birth cohorts from 1850 through 1950, using data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) for 1910 and 1980. Event-history analysis is used to predict timing of marriage by birth cohort, ethnicity, and nativity. The results indicate much greater ethnic dispersion in marriage timing among the cohorts born between 1851 and 1880 than for those born between 1921 and 1950, for both women and men. The sharp decline in ethnic variation in marriage timing suggests that with increasing duration in the United States a particularly American pattern of marriage evolved. Nonetheless, despite considerable compression among European ethnics in the timing of marriage, as of 1980 ethnicity continued to distinguish age at marriage.

The Impact of Husbands' Retirement on Wives' Marital Quality

ABSTRACT Recent studies view retirement as a family transition that affects others in the close family circle, as well as the retiree, and is a process that occurs over time, and not as a single event. It therefore behooves us to learn more about how husbands' retirement affects the women with whom male retirees share their lives. Furthermore, most previous research has studied the wives of retirees using cross-sectional designs. In general, findings have indicated that husbands' retirement has little effect on wives' marital quality. This study is an advance over much of the previous research in that we use a longitudinal design. We have examined wives' assessments of marital quality including contextual life changes before their husbands' retirements, and have compared the assessments of the same wives following their husbands' retirements. To study these phenomena, we used data from the Normative Aging Study, administering the DAS to 61 wives prior and subsequent to husbands' retirement. We used means of the DAS scores and sub-scale scores at baseline and compared these scores at Time 2 by paired t-test. Positive change in the “cohesion” sub-scale of wives' DAS scores before to after husbands' retirement suggests that shared activities increased after retirement, and that the increase was pleasing to the wives. Multiple regression analysis found that income change, and change in husbands' health contributed most to marital quality change among wives, with changes in wives' employment status also contributing. To specify retirement-context conditions including the subscales of satisfaction, cohesion, consensus and affection, additional multiple regression models indicated continuity in wives' marital quality scores pre-to post-husbands' retirement. Implications of the findings for practice and future research are discussed.

Marital status changes and body weight changes: a US longitudinal analysis

The role of spouse is associated with better health. The dynamics of spousal roles can be represented by marital trajectories that may remain stable or may change by entry into marriage, dissolution of marriage, or death of a spouse. Body weight is an important health-related characteristic that has been found to have mixed relationships with marital status. This analysis examined changes in marital status and body weight in 9043 adults in the US National Health and Nutrition Epidemiological Follow-up Survey (NHEFS), a longitudinal national study that interviewed and measured adults in a baseline assessment and reassessed them again in a follow-up approximately 10 years later. Men's and women's weights were differently associated with marital changes. Women who were unmarried at baseline and married at follow-up had greater weight change than those who were married at both times. Analysis of weight loss and weight gain separately revealed that sociodemographic variables, including marital change, were more predictive of variation in weight loss than weight gain. Unmarried women who married gained more weight than women married at both times. Men who remained divorced/separated and men who became widowed lost more weight than men married at both baseline and follow-up. These findings suggest that changes in social roles, such as entering or leaving marriage, influence physical characteristics such as body weight.

'With Notice of the Consequences': Liberal Political Theory, Marriage, and Women's Citizenship in the United States

Using case law and other legal sources, this article explores how many judges, scholars, and government officials in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used classical liberal political theory, particularly notions of consent, to construct a woman's changed citizenship on marriage as her own independent choice. In the United States, rules that made a married woman's citizenship dependent on that of her husband reveal a current of ascriptive citizenship in competition with the liberal political tradition, even while judges used that political theory to justify gender hierarchy and limit women's sexual citizenship. This article contributes to understandings of sexual citizenship--in this particular context, with whom and under what conditions a woman could legitimately enjoy sexual intimacy--by revealing certain layers and categories that masked its regulation. The underlying rules requiring marital citizenship change for women were themselves removed from direct questions of sexuality, creating a significant incentive structure for marriage with citizen men, but not prohibiting intimacy with others. Judges, legal scholars, and others justified the gender hierarchy that dependent citizenship created for married women through the liberal political theory that both assumed, and then disregarded, women's knowledge and consent.

Challenges Family Scholars May Face in Studying Family Diversity

American families have changed rapidly in the past few decades. For instance, U.S. families are more ethnically and racially diverse than ever before, family structures vary widely as a result of marital transitions and changes in cultural mores, and technological and social changes have altered the experience of parenthood. Family scholars often have found it difficult to adequately stay abreast of such transformations. There are many indications that changes will continue to occur in the next few decades, perhaps even more rapidly than before. In this article, the authors, as young family professionals, discuss what they see as current and future issues professionals face in studying and working with families. Latino families, stepfamilies, and reproductive technology are presented as examples in which diversity presents challenges.