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

by Nicholas H. Wolfinger

Growing up in a divorced family can cause the children to have difficulties in maintaining relationships. Nicholas Wolfinger demonstrates the significant impact of parental divorce upon people's lives and society. The divorce cycle phenomena ensures the transmission of divorce from one generation to the next. This book examines how it has transformed family life in contemporary America by drawing on two national data sets. Compared to people from intact families, the children of divorced parents are more likely to marry as teenagers, but less likely to wed overall. They are more likely to marry other people from divorced families, but more likely to dissolve second and third marriages, and less likely to marry their live-in partners.

194 pages, Paperback

First published August 30, 2001

Reviews

[Briana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vaguely interesting, but it reminds me why I don't read many sociology books. It has one or two basic points (children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorces than children from intact families--probably due to personality traits and a transmitted belief that marriage is easily dissolved) that it repeats multiple times. The author also continuously points out what are NOT reasons for the divorce cycle, even though it isn't clear whether anyone has put forth these reasons and there's a real need to dismiss them. On top of this, the writing is generic and often vague. There may be something of substance here, but I disagree this had to be a monograph instead of a short journal article.

[Leslie Jonsson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, if not in need of an update (this was published in 2005). Not much material concerning gay marriage families, but does cite excellent information at the time concerning the extremely true cycle of divorce.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was probably useful for someone involved in politics (a lobbyist? a politician? an aide?) who had to justify a public policy position related to marriage and divorce. I don't know how to figure out which speeches, letters, or statements before Congress or the Senate cited it, however. (If you know, message me!)

The upshot, as I understood it, is that yes, there is a definite correlation between being raised in a household in which the parents got divorced, and getting divorced yourself. There are also concrete negative financial and social effects of getting divorced and of being a child in a divorced family - However, there are fewer and fewer of these effects as our laws and our society have grown accustomed to the fact of divorce.

In other words, when our laws started protecting women from financial disadvantages taken by men, the children (who often lived with their mothers) were not as financially vulnerable. As society began to understand the very real reasons a man and woman might need to separate, the stigma of divorce diminished, and therefore the social and emotional isolation felt by divorced people diminished.

At the time it was published (over a decade ago - 2005), there were still, unbelievably, national politicians discussing laws that would restrict individual rights to file for divorce (in an effort to "save marriage"), and I suspect this book helped liberal, progressive politicians to push back on that and keep moving our society forward in terms of honoring the financial and social respect of people getting divorced - which at the time meant preserving a woman's right to be independent.

(NOTE: This work focused almost entirely on male-female marriages and divorces, because it drew from national data sets that were tracking marriages over several decades, and there wasn't enough data from previous decades about same-sex marriages.)

Why did I rate it 3 stars? I don't usually read this sort of thing, but I met the author, who lives near me. Well, and I've got 2 almost-grown children, I'm divorced, I'm the child of a divorced couple, and of my 2 sets of grandparents, one of them probably should have gotten divorced. So, I'm curious about the topic. In the end, I think it's too dense to recommend to any readers outside of politics and academia. The rest of us could read only the conclusion - in a glossy magazine article with an appropriate photo of a happy child of a divorce. Maybe Wolfinger will do a follow-up study a decade later and publish it for the masses?