11/27/01
Divorce in the United States
A little less than half of all marriages that begin this year will end in divorce at some point in the future. Divorce is no longer a rare and stigmatized occurrence it is an inevitable risk of marriage.
Our relatively high divorce rate is often attributed to things like the decreasing influence of religion in people’s lives, the liberalization of divorce laws, the rise of individualism and women’s increasing participation in the paid labor force. These changes have created a cultural shift in the perception of marriage.
Marriage has become a voluntary contract that can be ended at the discretion of either spouse.
Diane Vaughan - Uncoupling – The process of breaking up is a definitional process that emerges over time. Symbolic interactionism can be used to understand this definitional process that emerges over time.
Harboring Secret Unhappiness
Making the Initial Disclosure
Pursuing Outside Involvements
Accentuating the Negative
Deciding to Separate
The pain of going public.
Racial, Ethnic, and Religious Variation –
Studies consistently show that African Americans are more likely than other groups to separate and divorce. But this difference has less to do with race than with socioeconomic status. Studies that compare whites and African Americans of similar socioeconomic status – that is, similar levels of education, income, occupational prestige, and unemployment- find similar rages of divorce.
Conversely, the cultural emphasis on family in most Hispanic groups and the constraining role that the Catholic Church plays in their lives may explain their relatively low rate of divorce.
Among Asian Americans, too, who have traditionally stressed the family unit over the individual, divorce still carries a significant stigma. Hence, the divorce rate among Asian Americans has consistently been lower than that of the population as a whole. For both Hispanic and Asian-American groups, though, divorce rates are increasing among young people, who are generally less influenced than older generations by traditional religious or ethnic values.
Other factors – Interfaith marriages tend to be less stable than marriages between people of the same religion. The divorce rate is also high among couples who are unaffiliated with any religious institution, since they are less bound by social conventions and face fewer sanctions than those actively involved with their faith.
Changes in divorce laws over the past 2 decades have made it easier for people in unsatisfying marriages to end then. However, no-fault divorce laws have had disastrous effects on some women and children, who are likely to suffer financially as a result of divorce. Thus, some states have attempted to make divorces more difficult to obtain.
Some researchers and policymakers are promoting legislation aimed at redistributing the financial burden of divorce. Current initiatives range from restricting access to divorce to publishing the pictures and identification of parents who have reneged on paying child support.
Some recent policy initiatives are aimed at returning to the times when divorce was more difficult to obtain, with the intent of forcing people to work harder at making marriage work. Louisiana – "covenant marriage" in which the state will enforce an agreement not to divorce except for adultery, physical or sexual abuse, alcoholism or a year’s abandonment.
Stephanie Coontz says that the efforts to make divorce harder to obtain have been fueled by Judith Wallerstein’s longitudinal study of 131 children whose parents divorced in 1971. In 1989 Wallerstein published a study claiming that almost half had experienced serious long-term psychological problems that interfered with their love and work lives.
But there is good reason to worry about the massive publicity accorded Wallerstein’s work. Her estimates of the risks of divorce are more than twice as high as those of any other reputable researcher in the filed. Her insistence that the problems she finds were caused by the divorce itself, rather than by pre-existing problems in the marriage, represents an oversimplified notion of cause and effect repudiated by most social scientists and contradicted by her own evidence.
Her evidence. More representative samples of kids form divorced parents yield much lower estimates of risk than Wallerstein. Interestingly, children whose parents divorced in more recent generations are experiencing less severe problems that those whose parents divorced when laws and social stigmas were stricter.
Some past studies have confirmed the children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorced themselves. But another new study shows that even this so-called inheritability of divorce is also on the decline.
Similar progress has occurred in post-divorce parental contact. Surveys at the beginning of the eighties found that more than 50% of children living with divorced mothers had not seen their fathers in the preceding year, while only 17% reported visiting their father weekly. But a 1988 survey found that 25% of previously married fathers saw their children at lest once a week and only 18% had not visited their children during the past year.
Most of the societal concern over high divorce rates focuses on the impact on children. However, the bulk of research suggests that the problems children experience after a divorce are caused not by the breakup but by the conflict between the parents. In fact, children who grow up in intact but conflict-ridden families may suffer more than children whose parents divorce but maintain a friendly relationship.
Much of the effect of divorce on children can be predicted by conditions that exist before the parents actually separate. When children maintain a good relationship with their parents after a divorce, the negative effects of the breakup can be minimized.
Custody –
The majority of fathers don’t seek custody of their children. Even if there is a preference for maternal custody.
Joint legal custody – recognizes the rights of both parents to make major decisions affecting the child’s life.
Joint physical custody – not only do parents have decision making, but they also share in the physical care of the child.
Although mothers still retain custody of children in the vast majority of divorce cases, joint custody and paternal custody are becoming more common.
But child-support policies remain inadequate to meet the economic needs of children single-parent families.
Men experience an average 10% increase in their standard of living after a divorce because in many cases they no longer have a wife and children to support on a day-to-day basis; divorced women (an their children) experience on average a 27% decreased.
Divorce is the single most devastating economic event for American women today.
Divorce and Children - 65% of the divorces that occur each year involve couples with minor children. A substantial body of research shows that regardless of race or education of parent, children raised in single-parent homes fare worse at every stage of life than children from two-parent families. They are more likely to do poorly in school or drop out, commit delinquent acts, and engage in drug and alcohol abuse. When the become adults, they get lower paying jobs and are more likely to be unemployed or end up in jail. When they form relationships, they are more likely to marry young, have children early, and divorce.
Research indicates that how well children adjust to their parents’ divorce depends on a lot of things, such as the children’s gender, age at the time of separation, duration of life in a single-parent household after the divorce. Furthermore, the way the children were raised, the economic resources available to them, their sense of emotional security, their enduring relationships with parents or other caring adults and the amount of supervision they continue to receive can also influence their post-divorce adjustment.
"The Economic Consequences of Divorce" Frank F. Furstenberg, Jr. and Andrew J. Cherlin
In America we leave it up to individual couples to sort out their personal affairs when their marriages break up. The state only becomes an active party when they cannot resolve their differences. But this strong commitment to letting divorcing couples reach their own private agreements often works to the disadvantage of mothers and children.
The fact that men and women contribute unequal amounts to the total family income poses no problem so long as the family continues to operate as a common unit. Men and women trade labor inside and outside the home to the benefit of all family members. But divorce disrupts the family distribution system. Most fathers still rely on their former wives to care for the children, and most mothers still expect financial support from their former husbands – even though they don’t live together. Dependent children must be guaranteed domestic stability and economic security even though parents no longer pool resources. Unfortunately there is no formula for converting a two-parent household economy into two separate units.
Inadequacy of court-ordered child-support payments. In a little over half of all divorces involving children, noncustodial fathers are required to pay child support. Of these, 51% pay the full amount, 24% pay a partial amount, and 25% pay nothing. (1997) About three-quarters of divorced mothers therefore don’t receive any financial assistance at all.
Despite these governmental efforts, a recent report form the Department of Health and Human Services shows that delinquent parents still shirk court orders in four of every five cases. Custodial parents still collect less than 20% of the child support they are owed.
How much difference would it make to children if ex-husbands paid a fairer share?
Irwin Garfinkel developed a scheme that is now being applied in Wisconsin; variations on it have been adopted by about half of the other states. Noncustodial fathers are required to pay a fixed proportion of their gross income that varies according to the number of children they have, ranging in Wisconsin from 17 percent per year for one child to 34 percent per year for five or more.
In 1996 the Department of Health and Human Services established a national databank of fathers who avoid paying court-imposed child support. Officials are now able to reach across state lines to seize "deadbeat" fathers’ property (homes, cars, and so forth), garnish wages and secure money directly from a checking accounts even if located in another state.
In addition President Clinton recently directed the Department of Health and Human Services to require mothers to provide the names of their children’s fathers and other identifying information before they can receive welfare benefits. Those who refuse will not receive payments, although the policy provides an exception for women who can’t identify the father or who are afraid of physical abuse.
What economic decline means to children –?
The national data show that currently divorced women and their children do not regain their predivorce standard of living until five years after the breakup, on average.
If they have been out of the job market or only working part time, it takes a long while before they acquire skills and experience needed to earn enough to support a family. In the short term, though the surest means to a quick economic recovery is through remarriage. So a woman’s economic position remains tied to her marital status even after she divorces.
Many women take temporary shelter in their parents’ households. Sara McLanahan, in a study of the economic consequences of divorce, discovered that almost two fifths of divorced mothers move in the first year after divorce, a rate far higher than the occurrence for stably married families during the same interval. Even after the first year, divorced women continue to move at a rate of about 20 percent a year, about one third more often than women in intact marriages do. More of the moves reported by divorced women resulted form necessity than choice especially in the immediate aftermath of divorce.
Many women work longer hours at work and then spend less time at home. One study found that the proportion of women working 1,000 hours a year or more rose from 1 to 73 percent after a separation.
Why don’t fathers pay more? A substantial number of women are willing to pay, in effect, to stop their former husbands from interfering in their affairs. Many more women would like to collect support but are unable to get a binding agreement. Some fathers simply disappear when the marriage ends. In the Census Bureau survey, the most common reason that women report for why they were not able to reach a child-support agreement was that they were unable to locate the father. And even when fathers remain in the picture, it is often difficult to get them to pay. In Terry Arendell’s study, several women had given up on trying to obtain child support because they lacked the resources, energy, or persistence to obtain a binding agreement.
There are many reasons, including economic ones, why men fail to pay the amount agreed upon. Remarriage by either partner often erodes a man’s commitment to child support.
For poor women, the approach of simply forcing noncustodial fathers to pay more child support wouldn’t work. Low-income custodial mothers tend to be associated with low-income noncustodial fathers.
Absent fathers – Financial support isn’t the only thing missing from the lives of many children whose parents are divorce. In general, noncustodial fathers tend to play only a minor role in their children’s everyday lives. One national study found that half of the children whose parents were divorced hadn’t seen their fathers in the previous year, and only one out of six had regular weekly contact with the noncustodial father. Children were most likely to see their fathers immediately after the separation. But after several years contact dropped off sharply.
Remarriages and stepfamilies – Half of all marriages today involve at least one partner who was previously married. 1990s – 75% of divorced men remarry – about 67% of divorced women. At the same time that remarriage rate have decreased, the number of cohabiting couples has increased.
The divorce rate for second marriages is actually higher than the divorce rate for first marriages. 37% of remarriages collapse within the first 10 years, compared to 30% of first marriages.
The complexities of “Blended” families. – One in five families today is a blended family.
Remarriage has been described as an “incomplete institution” meaning that it lacks the guiding norms, values, and role expectations that first marriages typically have.
Relationships between stepsibling, stepparents and stepchildren are complex and problematic.
The “success” of remarriages and stepfamilies depends in large part on the nature of the divorce itself. Adults and children who welcomed a divorce or defined it as basically a “good thing” are more likely to anticipate remarriage with eagerness and to see it as a chance for a new start.
The high divorce rate or remarriages and the high levels of conflict within some stepfamilies are not simply an outgrowth of the spouses’ psychological inability to sustain intimate relationships but also because remarriages are not fully institutionalized. The lack of clear role definitions, the absence of established societal norms and the increased complexity of the family structure all increase the likelihood of tension and turmoil.
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