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    Effects of Parental Separation and Divorce

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    Joy Pasco
    The document analyzes data from a study on the effects of parental separation on children aged 3 and under. It finds that while children in single-parent families performed worse on assessments than those in two-parent families, this difference was reduced or eliminated when controlling for factors like mother's education and income. The psychological development of very young children appears to not be significantly affected by parental separation alone, but rather is related to other social and economic factors.

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    Effects of Parental Separation and Divorce

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    Joy Pasco
    35 views3 pages
    The document analyzes data from a study on the effects of parental separation on children aged 3 and under. It finds that while children in single-parent families performed worse on assessments than those in two-parent families, this difference was reduced or eliminated when controlling for factors like mother's education and income. The psychological development of very young children appears to not be significantly affected by parental separation alone, but rather is related to other social and economic factors.

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    The document analyzes data from a study on the effects of parental separation on children aged 3 and under. It finds that while children in single-parent families performed worse on assessments than those in two-parent families, this difference was reduced or eliminated when controlling for factors like mother's education and income. The psychological development of very young children appears to not be significantly affected by parental separation alone, but rather is related to other social and economic factors.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    35 views3 pages

    Effects of Parental Separation and Divorce

    Uploaded by

    Joy Pasco
    The document analyzes data from a study on the effects of parental separation on children aged 3 and under. It finds that while children in single-parent families performed worse on assessments than those in two-parent families, this difference was reduced or eliminated when controlling for factors like mother's education and income. The psychological development of very young children appears to not be significantly affected by parental separation alone, but rather is related to other social and economic factors.

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    Effects of Parental Separation and Divorce

    on Very Young Children

    K. Alison Clarke-Stewart

    University of California, Irvine

    Kathleen McCartney

    University of New Hampshire

    Deborah L. Vandell

    University of Wisconsin—Madison

    Margaret T. Owen

    University of Texas at Dallas

    Cathryn Booth

    University of Washington

    Data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Study of

    Early Child Care were analyzed to explore effects of marital separation on children

    in the first 3 years of life. The sample included 73 never-married mothers and 97

    separated mothers; a comparison group of 170 was conditionally randomly selected

    from the 2-parent families. Children in 2-parent families performed better than

    children in 1-parent families on assessments of cognitive and social abilities,

    problem behavior, attachment security, and behavior with mother. However, controlling for mothers'
    education and family income reduced these differences, and

    associations with separated-intact marital status were nonsignificant (the effect size

    was .01). Thus, children's psychological development was not affected by parental

    separation per se; it was related to mothers' income, education, ethnicity, childrearing beliefs,
    depressive symptoms, and behavior.

    Today, in the United States, 20 million children are living with just one parent (U.S. BuK. Alison Clarke-
    Stewart, Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California,

    Irvine; Deborah L. Vandell, Center for Education


    Research, University of Wisconsin—Madison; Kathleen McCartney, Department of Psychology,
    University of New Hampshire; Margaret T. Owen, School

    of Human Development, University of Texas at Dallas; Cathryn Booth, Department of Family and Child

    Nursing, University of Washington.

    This study is part of the National Institute of Child

    Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of

    Early Child Care. We acknowledge the generous

    support of the NICHD. We also thank our coinvestigators in the Study of Early Child Care, the site

    coordinators and research assistants who collected

    the data, and the families and teachers who continue

    to participate in this longitudinal study.

    Correspondence concerning this article should be

    addressed to K. Alison Clarke-Stewart, Department

    of Psychology and Social Behavior, Social Ecology

    II 3340, University of California, Irvine, California

    92697.

    reau of the Census, 1998), and demographers

    predict that about half of America's youth will

    spend some part of their childhood in a oneparent family (Ahlburg & DeVita, 1992). Although a slight
    decline in the divorce rate has

    occurred in recent years, more than 1 million

    children still experience the divorce of their

    parents each year (U.S. Bureau of the Census,

    1995), and in addition, nearly one birth in three

    is to an unmarried mother (Bumpass & Raley,

    1995).
    Because divorce and single motherhood are

    so common, it is important to know whether the

    psychological development of these children,

    compared with those in intact married families,

    is at risk. Scores of researchers have studied the

    effects of divorce on school-age children and

    adolescents, and there is a growing literature

    focused on the effects of parental divorce on

    adult children. The consequences for very

    young children have been less widely studied,

    however, and research on the effects of divorce

    on infants is virtually absent. It was our purpose

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