Doing better, feeling worse

How parental divorceaffects children's ability to judge their own relationships

By PT Staff, published on November 01, 1993 - last reviewed on August 30, 2004

Doing Better, Feeling Worse

Count among the legacies of divorce a certain amount of relationship anxiety. If your parents were divorced, you're likely to think your own marriage is in trouble--even when it isn't.

Men and women whose parents split while they were growing up are just as likely to have a happy marriage as are folks from intact families, reports a team of Michigan sociologists. But even when happily married, they are more likely to think that their own marriage is full of conflict.

Adult children of divorce are 70% more likely than their peers from nonfractured families to fear their marriage is suffering. They're also more inclined to consider divorce in the face of marital problems. Having seen their parents split up, they accept divorce as an option.

Pamela Webster, Ph.D., and colleagues surveyed more than 13,000 adults whose parents had divorced, who had experienced the death of a parent, or who had never lived with their biological father.

Children of divorce, she found, report problems in communication--they tend not to know how to de-escalate the conflict that is inevitable in married life. So they constantly perceive marital trouble.

It's not merely the absence of a parent that hurts them. Those who had lost a parent through death felt no more marital anxiety than those from intact families, while those who'd never lived with a biological father had the same feelings of anxiety as the offspring of divorce.

The loss of a parent through divorce gives rise to feelings of betrayal and an insecurity that endures. A child who loses a parent through death may feel betrayed, but such feelings usually disappear with maturity.