Individual, Familial and Environmental Determinants of Children's Post-Divorce Adjustment and Maladjustment.

Abstract

Two problems are common to much of the divorce literature. Psychological outcomes are traditionally limited to maladaption. Investigation of individual, familial and environmental influences on children's divorce adjustment are frequently studied independently. The goals of the current study were to expand psychological outcomes to include enhanced funtioning and to undertake the concurrent investigation of the primary influences on this adjustment. The later process allowed the determination of the relative importance of outcome influences. Eighty-two mother/child pairs from divorced homes and forty-seven mother/child pairs from intact homes were asked to complete measures assessing life change events, marital hostility, parenting skills, parent adjustment, child behavior adjustment and children's self-concept. Children's divorce outcomes were found to lie along two independent dimesions: maladaptation and enhanced, prosocial skills. Environmental (children's life change events) and familial (marital hos...