The Effects of Divorce on America by Patrick F. Fagan and Robert Rector
Fagan: American society may have erased the stigma that once accompanied divorce, but it can no longer ignore its massive effects. As social scientists track successive generations of American children whose parents have ended their marriages, the data are leading even some of the once-staunchest supporters of divorce to conclude that divorce is hurting American society and devastating the lives of children.
1. "After divorce, children tend to become more emotionally distant from both the custodial and non-custodial parent." Paul R. Amato and Alan Booth, A Generation at Risk (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 69, reporting the findings of Rossi and Rossi (1991).
2. "This emotional distance between children and parents lasts well into adulthood and may become permanent. As adults, children of divorced parents are half as likely to be close to their parents as are children of intact families. They have less frequent contact with the parent with whom they grew up and much less contact with the divorced parent from whom they have been separated." Lye et al., "Childhood Living Arrangements and Adult Children’s Relations with Their Parents," pp. 261-280, and William S. Aquilino, "Later-Life Parental Divorce and Widowhood: Impact on Young Adults’ Assessment of Parent-Child Relations," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 56 (1994), pp. 908-922
3. "Compared with continuously married mothers, divorced mothers--whether custodial or non-custodial--are likely to be less affectionate and less communicative with their children and to discipline them more harshly and more inconsistently, especially in the first year after the divorce. In particular, divorced mothers have problems with their sons, though their relationship is likely to improve within two years even when some discipline problems persist up to six years after the divorce." E. Mavis Hetherington, Roger Cox, and Martha Cox, "Long-Term Effects of Divorce and Remarriage on the Adjustment of Children," Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, Vol. 24 (1985), pp. 518-530.
4. "Divorced mothers, despite their best intentions, are less able than married mothers to give the same level of emotional support to their children." Jane E. Miller and Diane Davis, "Poverty History, Marital History, and Quality of Children’s Home Environments," Journal of Marriage and the Family, Vol. 59 (1997), pp. 996-1007.
5. "The quality of the relationship that divorced fathers have with their sons, often troubled before the divorce, tends to become significantly worse after the breakup. Finally, the higher the level of conflict during the divorce, the more likely the distance between father and children afterwards." Janet Johnston,
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