Myth #7: Because they are more cautious in entering marital relationships and also have a strong determination to avoid the possibility of divorce, children who grow up in a home broken by divorce tend to have as much success in their own marriages as those from intact homes. (From David Popenoe’s Top Ten Myths of Divorce.)
The idea that children of divorced parents are more likely to experience a divorce as adults is one that is well documented and well known. Most counselors/researchers have assumed the reason children-of-divorce get divorce themselves has to do with what was missing while they were growing up. If you never saw a healthy marriage or good communication/problem solving skills, then you would simply repeat what you did know. The assumption was parents simply taught poor relationship skills to the next generation.
Maybe not. Research by Paul R. Amato (What children learn from divorce) suggests there is little difference in relational skills.
Amato writes:
If learning poor relationship skills accounts for the intergenerational transmission of marital instability, then divorce among children should be elevated not only when their parents divorced, but also when their parents had a discordant but continuously intact marriage. Consequently, these results do not support an explanation based on relationship skills. Parental discord (in the absence of parental divorce) appeared to elevate children’s thoughts of divorce, but children with discordant parents did not necessarily translate these thoughts into behavior.
Seeing that marital discord isn’t the explanation, we tested an alternative theory, which assumes that children learn about marital commitment (or permanence) by observing parental models. The important mechanism, according to this perspective, is not parents’ problematic interpersonal behavior, but parents’ demonstration that the marital contract can be broken and that divorce can provide opportunities to seek greater happiness with new partners. These observations are likely to undermine children’s commitment to lifelong marriage.
Lack of commitment to marriage is what’s transmitted to the next generation. One generation teaches the next that marriage just isn’t meant to be for a life time.
Presumably, the opposite may also hold true: being intentional in teaching the value of commitment to our children may be an important part of maintaining marriage as an institution.
If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.
Yeah, I was going to say, I sure didn’t learn about good communication skills from my parents, there was a couple times I thought they would get divorced but they never did.
But I did learn about commitment and the importance of marriage from my parents.