Effects of Divorce on Children

When searching for an article to write a summary on I read through an article entitled "Longitudinal Studies of Effects of Divorce on Children in Great Britain and the United States" by various contributors. As I read through the statistics and various studies that were conducted in the United States and Britain alike I began thinking about the different effects of divorce on different types of children. I read an article earlier this year that gave statistics about the different financial effects of divorce on the mother and father when a child is involved, and as I was reading this new article I thought about what financial situation the children studied were in. The effects of divorce on children is usually great no matter what the circumstances are, which can be seen in the article, but I can't help but to think that children faced with financial troubles are effected even greater than those who have two parents with an income great enough to live comfortably. Being from a lower socioeconomic neighborhood I have seen the different effects of some of the better off people than the divorces that I saw around my neighborhood and the huge differences that were made on the children in both situations. I am not trying to discredit this article, but I think it would have been nice to see the different effects not only based on age and gender, but also family income and living situation as well. I feel that all of these factors can greatly increase or decrease the effects that a divorce has on a child and if these variables were added to the study it would have been that much better.

My question for everyone is how credible is the article since it doesn't really use a parent's income as a variable for the changes recorded in a child after a divorce? The economic status of a family can effect children even living with both parents, and since it has been seen that the economic status of both parents suffer after a divorce, children who were in a household who were only making under say $75,000 would be effected more than a household where the parents combined income is greater than that. I just thought that it was an interesting topic and wanted to know some other opinions on it.

Integrative Approaches to Family Policy and Youth Policy

Summary:

All member countries of the EU as well as many other OECD countries have developed programs for providing support to families. Overall, OECD countries‟ investment in services and financial benefits for families has increased considerably, rising from 1.6% of GDP in 1983 to 2.4% of GDP in 2003. But levels of spending differ widely across countries. The generosity of the Nordic countries, for example, contrasts strongly with the modest spending levels of some southern European countries. Moreover, the key objectives of family policies vary considerably across the OECD area, too. Priority may be an increase in fertility rates, or reconciling work and family life, or combating family/child poverty, or assisting with childcare and education or aiming to achieve a better balance between men and women in the degree to which they perform household duties. Importantly from the perspective of the report, policy approaches for families and children remain for the most part fragmented, and few countries have adopted an explicit and comprehensive family policy.

Instead, most countries have an amalgam of programs, policies and laws that are targeted at families with children. Yet what emerges quite clearly from the preceding overview of future trends affecting young families and young people is that they face a multitude of highly complex, often interrelated pressures and changes over the next two decades which are likely to necessitate an overall redesign of family policies. These differences start already with the age bracket to be addressed by youth policies – while international legal documents use a range of 15-24, countries like the Netherlands and the United Kingdom opt for a range of 0-24/25 years of age. They continue with the fact that in some countries youth policy is centralized and in others decentralized. Furthermore, while some countries prefer to set a broad overarching framework, others choose a more pragmatic, short-term problem-solving perspective. Progress is unlikely to be quick or easy, however. Bringing together such diverse strategies as improving compatibility of family and work; achieving better co-operation between youth welfare services and schools; enhancing social and occupational integration of young people (including of migrant background) in social hotspots; promoting the supply and take-up of possibilities for non-formal and informal learning; modernizing the vocational training system and curricula; and modernizing and Europeanizing higher education will prove enormously challenging, not least because of the still rather fragmented, compartmentalized approaches that currently prevails in the domain of youth policy.

What do you think of these policies that were developed?

Will these policies effect the future of the family?

Supernatural

This post doesn't really speak to the future of the family like the assignment asked, but rather family dynamics. Recently I've been catching up on the TV series Supernatural. It's a show based on the adventures of two brothers who hunt down evil beings like demons, vampires, spirits, etc. The pilot episode showed their mother being killed by a demon, and the basis of the show is that they are searching for the demon that did it, with some help from their dad. The brothers didn't have a normal childhood because their dad became obsessed with avenging his wife, so they were raised in the life of a hunter. Sam, the younger brother, got fed up with the life and tried to live normally by going to college for pre-law far away from his family. His past came back to haunt him though, and he had to embrace hunting again. The show is about killing evil things, but a large focus is on the relationships between the brothers and between them and their dad. The three of them are very close because they just have each other and live a life very few people in the show know about. Sometimes their bond directs their decision making, for example, taking into account the other brother's view when justifying a hunt.

This is relevant to the sociology of the family because some families have as much as a struggle as these characters do. Some people resent their parents for making them do certain things or raising them a certain way and feel they need a break from it all. They might use college as an opportunity to create distance, or they might use other avenues like the military or running away. It might be nice for a while, but family is important and it's very hard to stay away for too long. Supernatural is just a TV show, but the characters show very well that a person without close ties to their family may not have much direction and could be very alone. Though they get on each other's nerves a lot, they promote to the viewers that family is a valuable thing.

Are children that deal with divorce worse off?

I was reading up on an article that was written by Dr. Robert Hodges, Jr. that discussed the difference between children that are with divorced families and those that are with "intact" families. Studies have been done to examine the difference between them to see if there is really a difference. A study done by Amato and Keith in 1991 showed that there is a slight difference in the two. This study tested 92 participants and the results turned out to be that children in divorced households do have it slightly worse than those who live in intact households. These children have more difficulty in school, more behavior problems, more negative self-concepts, more problems with peers, and more trouble getting along with their parents. A more recent update of the findings indicates that this pattern continues in more recent research. Another way to examine this behavior was found by Mavis Hetherington in 1993. She wanted to examine the magnitude in which these children that were so called worse off. She wanted the severe behavior, even with the children that are in the intact families. On a measure of behavioral problems, Hetherington reported that 90% of the boys and girls in intact families were within the normal range on problems and 10% had serious problems that we would generally require some type of professional help. The percentages for divorced families were 74% of the boys and 66% of the girls in the normal range and 26% of the boys and 34% of the girls were in the problematic range. Amato estimated that about 40% of the young adults from divorced families were doing better than the young people from non-divorced families.

The data offered by Hetherington offers that it is very inconclusive to see who is better or worse off. The children from intact families are likely to need help do to their serious problems. The divorced-family kids are likely to need help but that is not conclusive evidence. It is going off of the statistics saying that do suffer more problematic issues but as of now do not need help. Amato said that 40% more of the young adults are more likely to do better in the long run than those from intact families.

So what causes these differences? You have parental loss which is the distance of one parent from that child. When this happens a child loses contact, skills, knowledge, and resources from that one parent that is distant. Then you have economic loss which is due to the fact that the child only can really depend heavily on one parent and that is the parent that is raising them. When it gets to single parent status then the child does not have as much economic resources of those children who live with intact families. With divorce also comes life stress. When a child goes through a divorce then, in many cases, that child has to change schools, living situations, and make new relationships. Also they have to adjust the ones that they already have, either with established friends or extended relatives. You have the lack of parental competence and that deals with the realization of the parent to help the child develop. Usually it doesn't go so well because that parent is still dealing with the divorce in their own way. This has a lot to do with how the child turns out. A most of all the exposure of conflict to the child. When parents are going through a divorce then there is a lot of banter and arguments that come along with it that the child is exposed to. When this happens the child's well-being is heavily affected.

In my opinion, I feel as though it just depends on how strong your parents are, mentally, with raising you and helping you develop. I came from a divorced family and I turned out fine. Although I'm just one case, it's from experience and I've heard other stories alike. I know some intact children that turn to the streets or even drugs for that matter. I think that in the short-run divorce children suffer more but in the long-run they are better off becasue it makes them a strong-willed person. So who is really worse off in the end?

Question: Are divorced-family children worse off than those who do not suffer divorce?

The Factors of the Future

Summary:

The factors that are going to shape the family landscape until 2030. A range of interrelated factors will be at play in changing the contours of family composition and functioning in the coming decades. These factors are population, union formation and dissolution, future household size, immigration, economic prospects, labor market and employment prospects, security and crime, and a sketch of the average family’s world to 2025/30. This section brings together an overview of a wide variety of long-term projections and forecasts in an effort to paint a broad-brush canvas of the range of influences shaping the environment for families over the coming years. It must be stressed however that they are projections and forecasts and that they will therefore inevitably turn out to be wrong, so great are the uncertainties surrounding even well-researched disciplines such as population projections. Nonetheless they provide a sense of the broad trends that are determining important features of family life as we move forward into the future.

a) Population

The last few decades have experienced social change on a remarkable scale. In particular there have been extraordinary gains in longevity in developed countries, with average life expectancy at birth rising from 66 years in 1950 to just over 76 years in 2007. Life expectancy at birth could continue to rise by at least a further 6 years by 2050, leading to a big increase in the number of people surviving to the ages of 80 and 90.This has had, and will continue to have, far-reaching implications for the composition of families, perhaps best grasped through a long-term historical perspective. In the United States, only one-in-five children born at the start of the 20^th Century would have had any grandparent still living by the time they reached the age of 30. By contrast, nearly one in seven children born at the start of the 21^st Century will have all four grandparents still alive by the age of 18, and by age 30 nearly one in eight will have at least one grandparent alive. At the other end of the spectrum, the last few decades have seen significant falls in fertility rates. Looking across developed countries as a whole, birth rates have declined sharply. In 1950, the total fertility rate (TFR), i.e. the average number of children being born per woman, was 2.8, but by 2007 the TFR had fallen to 1.6, leaving many OECD countries well below the fertility rate of 2.1 per woman needed to replace the population at a constant level (the so-called “replacement level”).

b) Union formation and dissolution

European countries and the United States shared a considerable marriage boom after the Second World War, where after general marriage rates declined – albeit less so in the US than in Europe. In some Northern European countries these rates have stabilized since the 1980s, while in the US they have continued to decline. Reasoned projections of future trends in marriage are few and far between. To the extent that the decline in general marriage rates is quite widespread, it would seem plausible to hypothesize that they will continue to fall in the years ahead. On the other hand, it is equally plausible that they could stabilize or even reverse, since inbuilt generational factors may come into play. For example, a US study of cohorts born in the 1950s and 1960s concludes that marriage will remain nearly universal for American women, so that general marriage rates may pick up again in the future once the effect of delaying marriage for educational purposes diminishes. The decline in the general marriage rate has been offset to some extent by the rise in non-marital cohabitation, whereby the two may be linked. In Scandinavia and some western European countries, cohabitation tends to have the character of an alternative or substitute for marriage, reflected in the increasing number of couples who remain together without marrying. In the United States, cohabitation tends to be more of a prelude to marriage. These contrasting trends make projections over several decades particularly hazardous. As concerns union dissolution, there is again an interesting contrast between European and US experience. During the 20^Th Century, divorce rates were higher in the US than in many western European countries. But while the upward trend continued it Europe, it declined in the US and divorce rates there are now closer to those in European countries. The picture on cohabitation dissolution rates is quite mixed, too. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they tend to be higher than divorce rates. But looking across Europe as a whole, some countries have higher and some lower rates than in the US. Where there does appear to be a widely shared trend, is that the combined result of divorce and cohabitation dissolution is a significant increase in the instability of unions, borne out by research in the United States, Canada and some European countries. Nonetheless, this is a social phenomenon whose pattern remains largely unpredictable one or two decades ahead. Some countries have however ventured into this difficult terrain. For England and Wales, for example, latest (2003-based) marital status projections assume that current trends, which are pervasive across Western societies, are set to continue. These involve less and later marriage, more cohabitation and some increase in partnership breakdown/divorce, although with some slowing in the rates of increase of earlier decades. Increased breakdown and the number of births occurring outside marriage point to more single-parent families so that by 2026 the number of people living in lone parent households (mainly lone mothers) is expected to rise nearly five-fold. The trend will be fuelled by the rise in divorce and cohabitation, and the more complex arrangements such as reconstituted family households. Projections for Great Britain also indicate that cohabitation will become more common than marriage in the prime childbearing ages of 25-34.

c) Future household size

Unfortunately, household projections are few and far between. No international organization produces household projections for countries or regions of the world, as is done for population by for example the United Nations, IIASA, the World Bank, and the US Census Bureau. Instead it falls to the statistical offices of a few countries to generate their own projections for planning purposes in such domains as housing, household services, or support services for the elderly. The principal determinants of future household size are changes in population age structure (ageing momentum), fertility rates and rates of household formation and dissolution, and as has been seen in the preceding sections, all three are evolving unfavorably in relation to household formation. Hence, official projections are unanimous in expecting that average family size in the developed world will in future not exceed 1.85 or 1.9. This is reflected at individual country level. In Great Britain, one-person households are expected to increase to 2026 for all age groups, not least for the under 25s and the 25-34 group (rising to around 1.3 million households for the two age-groups together), so that average household size is expected to decrease from 2.34 in 2004 to 2.11 in 2026 and 2.09 in 2029. The Australian Bureau of Statistics also projects a quite steep decrease in average household size – from 2.6 (in 2001) to 2.2/2.3 in 2026. In Japan – average household size is set to fall from 2.56 in 2005 to 2.27 in 2030 as a result of deep-seated structural changes - one-person households up from 29.5% to 37.4%; couples with children down from 29.9% to 21.9%; single parent households up from 8.4% to 10.3%.

d) Immigration

Historically, immigration has been an important determinant of many a country’s national family profile, and given the prospect of continuing global migratory flows in the decades ahead, it will in all probability remain so. In 2006 and average of 9% of OECD populations were foreign-born. Among countries, however, there are significant differences, with shares of foreign-born ranging from well over 20% in Australia, Switzerland and Canada, to around 12-14% in the US, Germany, France, Austria, Belgium and Sweden, and a mere 2.4% in Turkey and 1.1% in Japan. Within the foreign-origin populations, the proportion of “non-Western” people varies considerably – in Europe, for example, it ranges from around 40% for Austria, Norway and Sweden to over 65% for Germany and Denmark, and 77% for England and Wales. The age structure of the foreign-origin populations, particularly those of non-Western origin, is relatively youthful. For example, looking at the OECD area as a whole, about 60% of Indian, Filipino and Moroccan immigrant populations are aged between 15 and 44 (i.e. not even counting children). With respect to birth rates, the fertility of foreign-origin populations in industrialized countries has tended to converge to the national average, and in some cases to drop below it. But only in a few cases is that process complete. For instance, total fertility rates among Indians in Great Britain and among Caribbean immigrant populations in the Netherlands have dropped to roughly national levels, while Muslim and African fertility remains quite high but seems to be on a downward trend. Chinese and East African Asians in Britain exhibit fertility levels below the national average, while total birth rates of women born in Pakistan and Bangladesh are way above the national norm (4.7 and 3.9 respectively) as are those of African immigrant populations in Britain and Sweden. Thus, while the picture is mixed, it does suggest that increased inflows of “acculturated” populations may serve to maintain or even boost fertility rates. It is against this background of relatively youthful and fertile immigrant populations that future migration flows to OECD countries attract particular interest for the purposes of this report, because they can be expected to exert a key influence on OECD populations.

e) Economic prospects

An important ingredient in the mix of factors that determine marriage or cohabitation patterns, household and family formation and fertility rates is the economic situation of the individual and the longer term economic outlook. In particular with respect to the so-called “fertility trap”, the economic story would seem to play an important role. It goes something like this. “Lower fertility leads to faster population ageing and thus to deeper cuts in the welfare state, less job creation, and an expectation of lower economic growth in the future; at the same time, aspirations for personal consumption are still on the rise owing to parental wealth and fewer siblings; and the match of high aspirations and pessimism about the economic future will result in even lower fertility. This assumed economic mechanism has the potential to create a continuing downward spiral toward lower fertility.” There can be little doubt that material aspirations of young people have been rising over recent decades as a consequence of increasing parental wealth, high consumption standards communicated by advertising, and possibly even smaller family size (so that youngsters have fewer siblings to share with).

f) Labor market and employment prospects

As documented in youth surveys around Europe, the expectations of young people entering the labor market today are not optimistic. Interestingly, this somewhat somber mood among young people is not borne out by broader macro trends. Take the European situation for example. Recent projections by the European Commission (2006) show that: Firstly, younger cohorts are declining and will continue to decline through to 2030 and 2050, suggesting less intense competition among young people for jobs. Secondly, although the working-age population will begin to decline from 2010 onwards, the total number of persons in work in the EU-25 will continue to increase until around 2017. Thirdly, more than two-thirds of this increase will be a result of higher numbers of women in work, older women being gradually replaced by better-educated younger women with greater involvement in working life. Similar trends can also be observed in other non-European OECD countries, including Japan and Korea. However, youth unemployment is high in many countries and there are fewer secure jobs notably for women. As Fagnani (Annex II) points out, precarious jobs have been developing quite rapidly in Europe and Asia, not only in the form of fixed-term contracts but also in the shape of temporary agency work and involuntary part-time work. In Japan, Korea, Germany and Spain, these forms of employment are quite widespread among women and especially among married women and single mothers. Indeed, in Japan nonstandard employment accounts for more than half of women’s total employment.

g) Security and crime

Although not a major factor in shaping family structures, crime levels and drug and alcohol abuse can contribute to the general sense of security, influencing in turn decisions on whether to have family and where to settle. Forecasts of crime levels even at national level are very hard to find, so any prospective thinking needs to be based on existing trends amplified by any meaningful social and economic future trends that can be found. Some internationally comparable crime statistics are available (from e.g. Interpol, UN, ICVS, EU ICS) though coverage is not complete and they remain, like crime statistics at national level, notoriously difficult to interpret. Nonetheless, for theft, robbery, sexual offences and assaults and threats (i.e. offences typically affecting the family), crime rates do on the whole seem to have declined over the last ten years or so in OECD countries.

h) A sketch of the average family’s world to 2025/30

Taken together, the various prospects outlined above offer a set of signposts to the kind of world in which young families in OECD countries could well be living 20-25 years from now. At risk of considerable generalization, their environment could look roughly as follows: Many more grey-haired people will be in their vicinity than is currently the case; They will find themselves with at least four and possibly even five generations in the family alive at the same time, though not all under the same roof; Young families themselves will tend to be small, interacting with other small families; many of them will be single-parent and cohabiting-couple households; More young people will be preparing for higher education, especially girls; Young families living in urban centers will find themselves interacting much more with families of different ethnicity or of mixed origin; this will be felt especially at school and college as the numbers and shares of such children increase, exposing all children to a much richer range of cultural values and points of view (some consensual, some conflicted ) in the classroom; The overall economic situation will not be conducive to expectations of higher incomes, with overall economic growth rates quite modest over the period in question; slow reform of pay-as-you-go social security systems will weigh heavily on young-people’s pay packets, just as energy, food and possibly housing costs will weigh heavily on family budgets; Competition for jobs among young people will not be as intense as today, given the smaller cohorts, but there will be an abundance of more precarious job openings, so that competition for the “quality” employment opportunities will remain fierce; Security will remain a concern for parents in many countries, with alcohol and drug abuse increasingly an established part of the scene.

Do you feel that these factors are truly important to how the family is going to be shaped for 2030?

Are there are any other important factors that should be considered for the future?

The Current View of the Family Household

The mission of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The origins date back to 1960, when 18 European countries plus the United States and Canada joined forces to create an organization dedicated to global development. There are 34 member countries today that span the globe, from North and South America to Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. This organization includes many of the world’s most advanced countries but also emerging countries like Mexico, Chile and Turkey. The OECD works closely with emerging giants like China, India and Brazil and developing economies in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

Summary:

The OECD has a view of what the family household of OECD countries looks like today. The most dominant features of the family household composition for the entirety of the OECD area is the progressive decline in the average size of households, the rapid rise in one-person households, and the increase in single-parent households. In the European Union average household size has been falling for some time. About twelve percent of the population are now living in one-person households, and over four percent are lone parents. In the United States, average household size has fallen from 3.29 in 1960 to 2.59 in 2000. The baby boom had a great effect on the 1960 statistic so the fact that it has decreased only this much is not that harmful.

These trends are pretty international and can be largely explained by a combination of ageing of the population, lower birth rates, increasing divorce rates and break-up of co-habiting relationships. Marriage and birth rates are declining across Europe. Unmarried cohabitation and divorce are widespread and the number of re-constituted families is on the rise. However, rates of unmarried co-habitation vary widely from more than twenty percent in Sweden to between one and five percent in Southern European countries. The ratio of children being born to cohabitating people range from a high fifty percent in Sweden and Latvia to low single figures in Greece and Italy. Great Britain has witnessed an explosion of non-marital childbearing rising from 9% of all births in 1975 to 43% in 2004.

Divorce remains the main cause of the rise in lone parent families, but the sharp increase in births to cohabiting mothers has also been an important contributor (due to the high rates of break-up of such unions). Also, a recent study estimated that about three in every 20 men and women aged from 16-59 are in a relationship best described as “living apart together.” There is also an important ethnic dimension. Again, in Great Britain, household and family structures of ethnic minority groups tend to be rather different from the White group who made up some 92 percent of the population according to the 2001 census. Even after taking account of different age structure, Black and Mixed ethnic groups for example are much more likely to live as lone parent families, while those of South Asian ethnic background tend to live in larger units. However, despite the turbulences of recent decades, the family household has far from disappeared. In the United States around 70 per cent of all households are family households in; the EU-25 in 2004, over 45% of all private households corresponded roughly to the traditional notion of the nuclear family; and in Great Britain, most people still live in a family set-up (despite the growth in one-person households).

My Questions:

Do you think this is an accurate description of today’s families?

Do you think that the recent stability indicates a new equilibrium or just a lull?

Grey Divorce

Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family & Marriage Research has found that while the overall trend in America over the last 20 years has seen the divorce rate on the decline, the rate of dissolved marriages for those age 50 and above (i.e. the 'baby boomer' generation) has doubled in that same time. This phenomenon has become known as the 'grey divorce.' One family law attorney, Lisa Helfend Meyers, has written a piece about the differences that she has noticed between those who pursue grey divorces and younger people who also end their marriages. Meyers notes that child custody issues tend not to exist in these older divorces, because the couples' children tend to be at least in their teen years, and can make such decisions for themselves. Older divorcees are in a better financial position to get a divorce, because they generally have established themselves enough that they can afford not only to live alone, but can also pay for the divorce itself. Their better finances also make it more difficult to decide which partner is to receive which resources, however. Many aging baby boomers say that they have grown apart from and fallen out of love with their partners, but infidelity and the resulting pain associated with it is oftentimes even more devastating to an older relationship. The author claims that boomers are forgoing marriage in pursuit of personal happiness, and believes that this trend will continue for years to come. This form of marriage dissolution seems less harmful than the kind of divorce that plagues younger couples, because the children are affected less often and severely. It seems good for the family not only that divorce is on the decline, but also that the people who do pursue it do so for the best interests of the involved parties.