Chapter 15 Blog

Summary:

Chapter 15 is about separation and divorce. It starts with the processes of separation and divorce, both of which usually take some time to finalize. Separation includes four phases and may or may not lead to divorce. Bohannon has a view on the divorce process that is often used. It consists of seeing divorce as a six-station process. The stations are the emotional, legal, economic, coparental, community, and psychic stations. There are a lot of reasons for divorce. These range from the effect of having jobs, to being in the military, to being married young, to having trouble communicating to each other. With the no-fault divorce law, couples can give simple reasons for wanting divorces. Divorces affect children and adults in different ways. Adults have to make all the legal changes, decide on the type of custody, and change their lifestyles to account for not having another person to help support them. Children of divorce may feel closer to their parent or annoyed that they are now treated as a peer of the parent. They may experience worse parenting and economic problems, but within a couple years everyone adapts well, though unobvious problems, or “echoes of divorce,” may affect children for life. There are some good results of divorce, for example a child of divorce will generally have a better childhood than a child of a dysfunctional marriage because divorces eliminate many unhappy situations. A troubled couple may get marriage counseling to try to find solutions to feuds, but much counseling fails to help marriages.

New Material:

Something I learned was that joint custody makes up about 16% of custody cases. I thought it was a higher percentage, though I still thought sole custody was the main type, as it is. I probably thought that because most of the divorces I’ve seen happened to end up in joint custody.

Question/Concern:

My concern is more with Bohannon than the textbook. I think the coparental station of divorce fits under the legal station because there are a lot of decisions about the child/children made when going through the legal work, even about how much time the parents will spend with their child/children. Do you agree with those stations?