The development of children's understanding of marriage and divorce.

The aims of this study were: (1) to delineate children's attitudes evaluating marriage and divorce; (2) to describe the development of children's cognitive understanding of marriage and divorce between the ages of 5 and 10; and (3) to explain individual differences in children's cognitive understanding of and evaluative attitudes towards marriage and divorce, especially with respect to their family experiences, age, gender, and locus of control. The subjects were 119 white, middle-class children ages 61 months to 125 months in kindergarten, second, and fourth grade. Sixty-five of the subjects were female and 54 were male. One group lived with nondivorced, still-married parents. Children with divorced parents lived either with single divorced or separated mothers or with remarried mothers and stepfathers. The mean length of time since their parents' separation was 56 months; the mean length of time since the divorce was 39 months. All children were interviewed individually in their schools in a midwestern university city. They were administered four measures: (1) The Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale; (2) The Family Concept Interview (Gilby & Pederson, 1982); (3) Incomplete Stories with Doll Family (Cassidy, 1988); and (4) The Marriage and Divorce Interview. This semi-structured interview, developed specifically for this study, asked children both open and close-ended questions about 5 main themes with reference to a story line illustrated with paper dolls. The five themes were marriage, divorce of couple without children, divorce of couple with two young children, remarriage, and stepparents, both as social institutions and as possibilities for themselves, and the reasons, benefits, and disadvantages of these different marital situations. The major findings of the study were that: (1) There are distinct characteristics of age-related levels of understanding of marriage and divorce; (2) There are no significant differences in these levels of understanding between children of nondivorced and divorced families; (3) Yet, children's family experiences predict children's evaluative attitudes towards divorce; (4) Girls express a more complex level of understanding than boys; and (5) Secure attachment to mother predicts greater understanding of marriage and divorce.PhDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103961/1/9034480.pdfDescription of 9034480.pdf : Restricted to UM users only