Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

12. Understanding Children’s Family Worlds: Family Transitions and Children’s Outcomes

12 Understanding Children’s Family Worlds Family Transitions and Children’s Outcomes Judy Dunn 200 During the last decades of the 20th century and the first decade of the new century, increasing numbers of children have experienced their parents’ separation and periods in single-parent families and in stepfamilies, with the dramatic rise in divorce, cohabitation, lone parenting, and repartnering of adults. These patterns of change have been documented around the globe—in North America, in the United Kingdom and Europe, and in Australia and New Zealand (Pryor & Rodgers, 2001). Concern about the impact of these family changes on children, and the effects of the social and financial adversities that frequently accompany such family transitions, has produced a broad and extensive research literature—involving demographers , family sociologists, and developmental and clinical psychologists. This literature reflects changing perspectives on family influence more generally, and the lessons we have learned from it have very general implications for understanding children’s development , lessons that go beyond the specific issues concerning parents who separate. Changing Research Perspectives While the early research on divorce was often focused on relatively small, clinical groups, rather than representative populations, pathbreaking studies in the 1980s and 1990s were conducted within two different disciplines—first, by family sociologists and demographers (e.g., Amato & Booth, 1997; Cherlin et al., 1991; McLanahan & Sandfur, 1994), whose work was based on nationally representative samples and, second, by psychologists, notably Hetherington and her colleagues (Hetherington, 1989; Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992)—and these have transformed our understanding of the nature and influence of family change. The demographers documented such changes as the prevalence of child adjustment problems in families with separated parents and the key drop in income experienced by lone parents and its impact. The demographers provided many provocative findings, such as the evidence that in families in which parents divorced, children had shown higher rates of problems before the parental separation as well as after (Cherlin et al., 1991). Hetherington and her colleagues showed how parental separation frequently forms part of an ongoing process of potentially stressful changes for children (for instance, changes in neighborhood and school, dramatic decreases in family finances and in parental well-being and mental health, often the formation of stepfamilies, the experience of living in two households as a result of custody arrangements, and loss of contact with their biological fathers and with paternal grandparents). The documentation of this complex, changing set of experiences made clear that those attempting to study the impact on children of parental separation faced two sorts of challenges. The first was that this was a moving target and that longitudinal research was essential. The second was that parental separation involved a set of widely differing risk factors for children that ranged from broad social and economic adversities to problems in the intimate relationship processes within the family. The task for researchers was to understand how the broad “distal” risk factors affected children —and to what extent the impact of these risk factors was mediated through more proximal social processes within the family. (This is an issue that takes us beyond parental separation and divorce to such questions as how poverty, social adversity, and parental mental health affect children.) By the 1990s the number of studies reporting on large representative samples of children who had experienced divorce was sufficient to enable researchers to conduct meta-analyses of the findings on children’s outcome. One particularly important contribution was a meta-analysis by Amato and Keith (1991) that established a point of very general significance. This concerned individual differences in children’s response to parental separation and the constellation of events that preceded and followed the family change. The focus of the great majority of studies had been on the average prevalence of children’s problems following parental separation. They documented that children whose parents separated showed, on average , higher rates of adjustment problems (such as behavior and Family Transitions and Children’s Outcomes 201 Judy Dunn 202 emotional problems, school failure) than those who had not experienced these transitions. But as Amato (1994) pointed out, although the prevalence of problems was on average double that of children in families that had not gone through such transitions, these average effects were small, and variation among children in their response to family change was great. This established that the key questions that need to be answered are, which children are particularly vulnerable ? And which factors in the...