When Parents Divorce

Research on divorce consistently shows that children from divorced families are more likely to divorce. Often though, these studies are cross-sectional, which means that the investigators used data that was collected at one point in time. This is similar to taking a snapshot with a camera. A longitudinal study, however, is a sweep with a movie camera showing how marriages develop over a long period of a time as the partners grown and change at different stages in their lives. The repeated survey questionnaires, vexing as they are to some, offer a much more accurate view of the ebbs and flows of marriage.
     A near unique feature of our study is that we can compare the marriages of parents to children, as did Du Feng, Ph.D. Dr. Feng is a former graduate study and research assistant with our study and is now a faculty member of the University of Texas at Lubbock. Working with project director Roseann Giarrusso, Ph.D., Vern Bengtson, Ph.D., the principal investigator, and Nancy Frey, a graduate student at the University of Texas, Lubbock, Dr. Feng set out to unravel how parent's divorce transmits the likelihood of divorce to their children.
     Data for this study came from the 1988 and 1991 surveys of third generation respondents (G3s), those of you who are now in your late 40s and are in your first marriage. They also compared features of G3 marriages in 1991 with similar features from their parents' marriages back in 1971. The analysis was based on measures of marital satisfaction, closeness and ways of relating to one another.
     Results indicate that a parent's divorce does not increase the likelihood of their sons divorcing , but it does so for daughters.
     This might happen because the disruption of parent's divorce leads a young woman to marry at a younger age and with less education. These factors are repeatedly shown to be one of the unfortunate forerunners of divorce.
     One might think that our marriages are modeled on our parents -- for better or worse. Dr. Feng's study has taught us that the quality of parents' marriage when their children were young people has little impact on the satisfaction daughters find in their own marriages. However, she did find a link between mothers who had many negative feelings about the quality of their marriages in 1971 and their sons' feelings about their marriages 20 years later. Their sons were found to be more satisfied with their own marriages than sons of happily married mothers, according to their 1991 surveys.
     When it was fathers who were unhappily married in 1971, the unhappiness was transmitted to their sons. In fact, those same sons were less satisfied with their marriages than sons of happily married fathers.
     Untangling all the strands that form happy marriages is a difficult enough task in itself. Dr. Feng and her colleagues have made a real contribution in understanding the even more difficult problem of determining what effect parents' marriages have on their children, how that gets passed along, and shows up in their children's marriages 20 years later.