BiblioVault - Books about Divorce & Separation

Adolescents after Divorce

Christy M. Buchanan, Eleanor E. Maccoby, and Sanford M. Dornbusch

Harvard University Press, 1996

When their parents divorce, some children falter and others thrive. This book asks why. Is it the custody arrangement? A parent's new partner? Conflicts or consistency between the two households? Adolescents after Divorce follows children from 1,100 divorcing families to discover what makes the difference. Focusing on a period beginning four years after the divorce, the authors have the articulate, often insightful help of their subjects in exploring the altered conditions of their lives.

These teenagers come from a wide range of backgrounds. Some are functioning well. Some are faring poorly. The authors examine the full variety of situations in which these children find themselves once the initial disruption has passed--whether parents remarry or repartner, how parents relate to each other and to their children, and how life in two homes is integrated. Certain findings emerge--for instance, we see that remarried new partners were better accepted than cohabiting new partners. And when parents' relations are amicable, adolescents in dual custody are less likely than other adolescents to experience loyalty conflicts. The authors also consider the effects of visitation arrangements, the demands made and the goals set within each home, and the emotional closeness of the residential parent to the child.

A gold mine of information on a topic that touches so many Americans, this study will be crucial for researchers, counselors, lawyers, judges, and parents.

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Character Disturbance

the phenomenon of our age

George K. Simon

Parkhurst Brothers, Inc., 2011

Modern permissiveness and the new culture of entitlement allows disturbed people to reach adulthood without proper socialization. In a book meant both for the general public and for professionals, bestselling author and psychologist George Simon explains in plain English:

•How most disturbed characters think.
•The habitual behaviors the disturbed use to avoid responsibility and to manipulate, deceive, and exploit others.
•Why victims in relationships with disturbed characters do not get help they need from traditional therapies.
•A straightforward guide to recognizing and understanding all relevant personality types, especially those most likely to undermine relationships.
•A new framework for making sense of the crazy world many find themselves in when there's a disturbed character in their lives.
•Concrete principles that promote responsibility and positive change when engaging disturbed characters.
•Tactics (for both lay persons and therapists) to lessen the chances for victimization and empower those who would otherwise be victims in their relationships with many types of disturbed characters.

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Growing Up With a Single Parent

What Hurts, What Helps

Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur

Harvard University Press, 1997

Nonwhite and white, rich and poor, born to an unwed mother or weathering divorce, over half of all children in the current generation will live in a single-parent family--and these children simply will not fare as well as their peers who live with both parents. This is the clear and urgent message of this powerful book. Based on four national surveys and drawing on more than a decade of research, Growing Up with a Single Parent sharply demonstrates the connection between family structure and a child's prospects for success.

What are the chances that the child of a single parent will graduate from high school, go on to college, find and keep a job? Will she become a teenage mother? Will he be out of school and out of work? These are the questions the authors pursue across the spectrum of race, gender, and class. Children whose parents live apart, the authors find, are twice as likely to drop out of high school as those in two-parent families, one and a half times as likely to be idle in young adulthood, twice as likely to become single parents themselves. This study shows how divorce--particularly an attendant drop in income, parental involvement, and access to community resources--diminishes children's chances for well-being.

The authors provide answers to other practical questions that many single parents may ask: Does the gender of the child or the custodial parent affect these outcomes? Does having a stepparent, a grandmother, or a nonmarital partner in the household help or hurt? Do children who stay in the same community after divorce fare better? Their data reveal that some of the advantages often associated with being white are really a function of family structure, and that some of the advantages associated with having educated parents evaporate when those parents separate.

In a concluding chapter, McLanahan and Sandefur offer clear recommendations for rethinking our current policies. Single parents are here to stay, and their worsening situation is tearing at the fabric of our society. It is imperative, the authors show, that we shift more of the costs of raising children from mothers to fathers and from parents to society at large. Likewise, we must develop universal assistance programs that benefit low-income two-parent families as well as single mothers. Startling in its findings and trenchant in its analysis, Growing Up with a Single Parent will serve to inform both the personal decisions and governmental policies that affect our children's--and our nation's--future.

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The Illusion of Equality

The Rhetoric and Reality of Divorce Reform

Martha Albertson Fineman

University of Chicago Press, 1991

How do "no-fault," "gender-neutral" divorce reforms actually harm the lives of women and children they are designed to protect? Focusing on the language and symbols of reform, Martha Fineman argues that by advocating measures based on equality of treatment rather than of outcome, liberal feminists disregarded the socioeconomic factors that simultaneously place women at a disadvantage in the market and favor their taking on primary domestic responsibilities. She traces in persuasive detail the detrimental effects of equality rhetoric in shaping divorce law — such as the legal separation of parents' and children's interests; equality replacing need as the prime criterion for settlements; and the increase of state intervention into family life. More than a critique, this book is an incisive argument for adopting outcome-oriented measures and a valuable overview of the pitfalls of uncritically implementing any rhetoric as social policy.

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Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense

Edited by Janet Carsten, Hsiao-Chiao Chiu, Siobhan Magee, Eirini Papadaki, and Koreen M. Reece

University College London, 2021

A wide-ranging survey of how marriage relates to social change.

A series of global case studies, Marriage in Past, Present and Future Tense unravels the ever-changing intimate and institutional questions united by marriage. Traversing politics, economics, and religion, the authors explore how marital practices both react to and produce broader social transformation. In particular, the authors contend that contexts marked by violent sociopolitical ruptures such as civil war or colonization illuminate the links between the personal and political. What emerges is a complex portrait of marriage as a site of cultural memory, embodied experience, and active imagination.

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Recovering Origins

A Unique Healing Program for Adult Children of Divorce

Margaret Harper McCarthy

Catholic University of America Press, 2021

Recovering Origins is a healing program offered to adult children of divorced parents who now, with a certain distance from the practical difficulties that burden younger children, wrestle with the core problem at the heart of those difficulties. Having lost the community that brought them into the world, they have suffered a “primal loss.” Children are the literal embodiment of that community. When it is voluntarily dismantled, and worse–wished never to have been–the effect is not negligible. Children of divorce, by their own description, are now “pulled apart” as if “between two worlds.” They are “torn asunder.” Paradoxically the idea for Recovering Origins was occasioned by this straight talk about divorce. For, by going to the depths of the loss of one’s primal community one can be opened up to the Community that stands at the root of it. “Deep calls unto deep,” as the Psalmist says. In short, Recovering Origins invites participants to move through the broken image of love that they see in their parents, to the loving Origin which is more fundamental than any human reflection of it, broken or not. Recovering Origins begins with an invitation to look honestly at the actual experience of divorce, beyond all the “happy talk” about the “good divorce.” Participants are then invited to follow the path of the Lord’s Prayer, to recover what is at once challenging and precious to those whose very identities are on uncertain ground: the memory of God the Father, the goodness of their lives, and the real possibility of a good future. In this way, the program offers adult children of divorce a path to healing in the deepest sense. Recovering Origins offers an occasion to encounter the Christian Faith more deeply, especially where it bears on fundamental question faced by children of divorce in a particularly dramatic way. Recovering Origins addresses adult children of divorce, then, not only as individuals in need of pastoral care, but as potential witnesses to something they can, perhaps, see more clearly: the goodness and fidelity of the One on whom their lives ultimately depend and the possibility (and need) that that be reflected in an irrevocable and fruitful love between the creatures made in his image.

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Silent Revolution

The Transformation of Divorce Law in the United States

Herbert Jacob

University of Chicago Press, 1988

Conflict and controversy usually accompany major social changes in America. Such issues as civil rights, abortion, and the proposed Equal Rights Amendment provoke strong and divisive reactions, attract extensive media coverage, and generate heated legislative debate. Some theorists even claim that only mobilization and publicity can stimulate significant legislative change. How is it possible, then, that a wholesale revamping of American divorce law occurred with scarcely a whisper of controversy and without any national debate? This is the central question posed—and authoritatively answered—in Herbert Jacob's Silent Revolution.

Since 1966, divorce laws in the United States have undergone a radical transformation. No-fault divorce is now universally available. Alimony functions simply as a brief transitional payment to help a dependent spouse become independent. Most states divide assets at divorce according to a community property scheme, and, whenever possible, many courts prefer to award custody of children to the mother and the father jointly.

These changes in policy represent a profound departure from traditional American values, and yet the legislation by which they were enacted was treated as a technical correction of minor problems. No-fault divorce, for example, was a response to the increasing number of fraudulent divorce petitions. Since couples were often forced to manufacture the evidence of guilt that many states required, and since judges frequently looked the other way, legal reformers sought no more than to bring divorce statutes into line with current practice.

On the basis of such observations, Jacob formulates a new theory of routine—as opposed to conflictual—policy-making processes. Many potentially controversial policies—divorce law reforms among them—pass unnoticed in America because legislators treat them as matters of routine. Jacob's is indeed the most plausible account of the enormous number and steady flow of policy decisions made by state legislatures. It also explains why no attention was paid to the effect divorce reform would have on divorced women and their children, a subject that has become increasingly controversial and that, consequently, is not likely to be handled by the routine policy-making process in the future.

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