Divorce and Children

Parent and child relationship before, during, and after divorce

West Hills Community College

Parent and child relationship before, during, and after divorce

I, have done a reading on a particular topic regarding parent-children relationships that can and do affect divorce. It was a magazine article from the family journal (Amato, Paul R., Booth, Alan). In its context it explained many different aspects and angles of the relationships. Now myself being of the knowledge of research, I have found this article to be relatively well put together: only in some ways. I have also noticed it to be very sporadic in other directions.

In the first way I feel that it brings up phenomenal points in the regards to the length of the study. I feel that a well put together research takes much time and effort of collecting information. The ten year span they have really shows the heart and soul put into everything.

The second way is the diversity of people from which they asked to participate in the study. In my opinion, many people have many different life styles. When you receive the answers back and notice a resemblance in most of them, then you have a strong leg to stand on.

The third way is the way the researchers remained consistent in there findings. There wasn’t an abundance of ups and downs. This could have been just a coincidence, but for the average person reading they are much stronger to believe the findings.

Now onto the negative side of how I feel about this research. The first finding is the way they proclaimed there to be problems in the relationships of the parent-children before divorce. I don’t feel that you can compare the relationship problems in that time period. They suggest that because of the strained relationships at this point, around ten years before the divorce, is the reason why the divorce happened. I completely disagree with this. There are two many variables in a parents marital relationships to start then blaming the children. Now I know that the children can create some what of a hardship at times, but it is not the cause of divorce. Marital relationships carry many hardships and burdens at times. They have financial problems, work issues, and outside interferences. Children may be the case for a very few individuals, but not the majority or the end result for divorce.

The second pessimistic side is the average age of the children, which they chose to use: also they didn’t bare any information on how many children were in each house hold. They did the research on families that have an average ten year old. Stress seems to be in families with smaller children and houses that have more then two children. This part of the study just doesn’t hold together. They are choosing to blame the children for the problems in the relationships, but not backing up all the different parameters. The adults