Understanding the Divorce Cycle : The Children of Divorce in their Own Marriages

How does parental divorce affect children? This is the first book to focus exclusively on the relationship between growing up in a divorced family and offspring behavior in romantic relationships. Nicholas Wolfinger examines the effects of parental divorce on marriage timing and stability, mate selection and cohabiting relationships.

Growing up in a divorced family leads to a variety of difficulties for adult offspring in their own partnerships. One of the best known and most powerful is the divorce cycle, the transmission of divorce from one generation to the next. This book examines how the divorce cycle has transformed family life in contemporary America by drawing on two national data sets. Compared to people from intact families, the children of divorce are more likely to marry as teenagers, but less likely to wed overall, more likely to marry people from divorced families, more likely to dissolve second and third marriages, and less likely to marry their live-in partners. Yet some of the adverse consequences of parental divorce have abated even as divorce itself proliferated and became more socially accepted. Taken together, these findings show how parental divorce is a strong force in people's lives and society as a whole.