— Divorce has a bigger impact on
child-parent relationships if it occurs in the first few years of the
child's life, according to new research. Those who experience parental
divorce early in their childhood tend to have more insecure
relationships with their parents as adults than those who experience
divorce later, researchers say.
"By studying variation in parental divorce, we are hoping to learn
more about how early experiences predict the quality of people's close
relationships later in life," says R. Chris Fraley of the University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Psychologists are especially interested in
childhood experiences, as their impact can extend into adulthood, but
studying such early experiences is challenging, as people's memories of
particular events vary widely. Parental divorce is a good event to
study, he says, as people can accurately report if and when their
parents divorced, even if they do not have perfect recollection of the
details.
In two studies published today in
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin,
Fraley and graduate student Marie Heffernan examined the timing and
effects of divorce on both parental and romantic relationships, as well
as differences in how divorce affects relationships with mothers versus
fathers. In the first study, they analyzed data from 7,735 people who
participated in a survey about personality and close relationships
through yourpersonality.net. More than one-third of the survey
participants' parents divorced and the average age of divorce was about 9
years old.
The researchers found that individuals from divorced families were
less likely to view their current relationships with their parents as
secure. And people who experienced parental divorce between birth and 3
to 5 years of age were more insecure in their current relationships with
their parents compared to those whose parents divorced later in
childhood.
"A person who has a secure relationship with a parent is more likely
than someone who is insecure to feel that they can trust the parent,"
Fraley says. "Such a person is more comfortable depending on the parent
and is confident that the parent will be psychologically available when
needed."
Although there was a tendency for people to experience more anxiety
about romantic relationships if they were from divorced families, the
link between parental divorce and insecurity in romantic relationships
was relatively weak. This finding was important, the researchers say, as
it shows that divorce does not have a blanket effect on all close
relationships in adulthood but rather is selective -- affecting some
relationships more than others. They also found that parental divorce
tends to predict greater insecurity in people's relationships with their
fathers than with their mothers.
To help explain why divorce influences maternal relationships more
than paternal ones, and to replicate the first study's findings, Fraley
and Heffernan repeated their analysis with a new set of 7,500 survey
participants. Unlike in the first study, however, they asked the
participants to indicate which of their parents had been awarded primary
custody following their divorce. The researchers speculated that
paternal relationships were more insecure following divorce because
mothers are more likely than fathers to be awarded custody.
The majority of participants -- 74 percent -- indicated that they had
lived with their mothers following divorce or separation, while 11
percent indicated living with their fathers; the remainder lived with
grandparents or other caretakers. The researchers found that people were
more likely to have an insecure relationship with their father if they
lived with their mother and, conversely, were less likely to have an
insecure relationship with their father if they lived with him. The
results were similar with respect to mothers.
While it is premature to speculate on the implications of this work
for decision-making regarding child custody, the work is valuable as it
suggests that "something as basic as the amount of time that one spends
with a parent or one's living arrangements" can shape the quality of
child-parent relationships, write Fraley and Heffernan.
"People's relationships with their parents and romantic partners play
important roles in their lives," Fraley says. "This research brings us
one step closer to understanding why it is that some people have
relatively secure relationships with close others whereas others have
more difficulty opening up to and depending on important people in their
lives."
Source: http://to.ly/m7qm 
