When it comes to the effects of divorce on children, all parental splits are not created equal. That is what recent research from the University of Pennsylvania has found--research that is changing conventional wisdom on divorce.
"Two different kinds of marriages that end in divorce have very different impacts on children as adults," said Paul Amato, a Pennsylvania State University professor of sociology whose research was recently published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family.
Amato and University of Pennsylvania sociologist Alan Booth drew these conclusions after they began tracking a sample of 2,000 married individuals and 700 of their children in 1980, interviewing them every three to five years. The researchers followed the couples to see what factors affected marital happiness, what predicted divorce, and how these factors, including divorce, affected children's ability to form and maintain intimate relationships as adults.
After examining 300 marriages that ended in divorce, the researchers found that there were two types headed for divorce: high-and low-conflict. The prevailing wisdom is that most marriages that end in divorce are fraught with conflict, but the sociologists found the reverse: 60% of low-conflict marriages ended in divorce, compared with 40% of high-conflict ones. "I didn't trust these findings, because they were counterintuitive," Amato said.
The researchers checked the statistics against an independent sample of 5,000 married individuals who, before divorcing, were also interviewed every few years by researchers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The results were the same: 60% of low-conflict marriages ended as compared with 40% of high-conflict unions.
Amato's "work has shifted the debate of divorce because it changed the prevailing wisdom, which held that it was mostly families of high conflict that divorced," said psychologist Judith S. Wallerstein, co-author of "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce" (Hyperion, 2000) with psychologist Julia M. Lewis and writer Sandra Blakeslee. "What I found was most people who divorce are not in high conflict," Wallerstein added.
"There are many more families that I see fall apart because of loneliness, because of seven years of no sex or because they are bored."
Of particular interest to Amato and Booth, authors of "A Generation at Risk: Growing Up in an Era of Family Upheaval" (Harvard University Press, 1997), was what effect each kind of divorce had on children. They found that, post-divorce, children of high-conflict homes fared better than those of low-conflict marriages.
