Sociologists have known for some time that the children of parents who divorce are especially prone to divorce themselves. The way in which the divorce contagion spreads from one generation to the next was recently clarified in a study published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family by researchers from The Pennsylvania State University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In parsing data collected between 1980 and 1997 from 2033 married persons, the researchers first confirmed that parental divorce does indeed drive up the likelihood of divorce: among those interviewed for this study, "parental divorce approximately doubled the odds that offspring would see their own marriages end in divorce." What is more, the statistical linkage between parental divorce and offspring divorce "persists after controlling for a variety of variables measured prior to parents' marital dissolution." Hence, although the researchers concede the impossibility of controlling for "all possible third variables," they affirm that their study "provides the strongest evidence yet that the association between parents' and children's marital instability is causal."
The Penn State and Nebraska scholars then considered two contrasting hypotheses to account for this evidently causal linkage: 1) that children whose parents have divorced are especially likely to divorce themselves because they have been deprived of healthy "parental models" for developing "the skills and interpersonal orientations that facilitate the maintenance of long-term mutually satisfying intimate relationships"; 2) that children whose parents divorce are especially likely to divorce themselves because they have lost "faith in marital permanence."
To test these two hypotheses against each other, the researchers compared divorce rates among three different groups: 1) offspring with continuously-married, low-discord parents; 2) offspring with continuously married, high-discord parents; 3) offspring with divorced parents. Their results provide strong support for their second hypothesis (that elevated divorce rates among the children of divorce reflect a loss of faith in the ideal of marital permanence), but very little support for the first hypothesis (that elevated divorce rates among the children of divorce reflect impaired relationship skills).
Consonant with both the relationship-skills hypothesis and the faith-in-marital-permanence hypothesis, statistical tests established that "thoughts of divorce among offspring were elevated when parents had either a discordant marriage or a marriage that ended with divorce." However, only the faith-in-marital-permanence hypothesis could be readily harmonized with the finding that "divorce among offspring . . . was elevated only when parents had divorced." That is, while children of continuously married, high-discord parents were more likely to consider divorce than children of continuously married, low-discord parents, they were not significantly more likely to actually carry through with a divorce. The divorce rate among offspring of continuously married, high-conflict parents did run 28% higher than that among offspring of continuously married, low-conflict parents, but the researchers dismiss this difference as statistically "nonsignificant." "Apparently," the researchers remark, "growing up with troubled but continuously married parents predisposes offspring to contemplate divorce in their own marriages. But without a parental divorce to emulate, these thoughts are not generally translated into behavior." In other words, "when offspring did not experience a parental divorce, parental discord had few consequences for offspring's probability of divorce."
Indeed, in highlighting one of the more surprising results of their investigation, the researchers report that "divorce was most likely to be transmitted across generations if parents reported a low, rather than a high, level of discord prior to marital dissolution." The researchers speculate that the reason that parental divorce is especially likely to foster divorce among children when the parental relationship has been characterized by relatively little conflict is that divorce under such circumstances is particularly likely to be understood by children as evidence of "the nonbinding nature of the marital commitment."
The data thus lend little credibility to the notion that the children of divorce end up in divorce courts themselves because they have not learned good relationship skills. Rather, the data clearly implicate a loss of commitment to the ideal of marital permanence as the reason for the high divorce rates among the children of divorce. It is this "undermining of commitment" to lifelong marriage which emerges as "a primary mechanism underlying the intergenerational transmission of marital instability." The authors of the new study acknowledge that a commitment to marital permanence "may be harmful" if it causes a spouse to "stay in an abusive relationship." However, they also point out that "a strong commitment that motivates a spouse to find ways to revitalize a jaded relationship, seek counseling when the marriage is troubled, and stick together through the inevitable hard times may be beneficial."
