Father-Child Relationships After Divorce: Child Support and Educational Opportunity

Abstract

This is a report from a ten-year longitudinal study of the responses of children and their parents to separation and divorce. The study, which began in 1971, was designed to explore the experiences of sixty, largely white, middle-class Northern California families, whose 131 children were between two and eighteen years of age at the time of the decisive marital separation. Earlier papers (Wallerstein, 1984,1985a, 1986; Wal lerstein, Corbin & Lewis, in press) have described the psychological attributes and attitudes of these young people at the end of the postdi vorce decade, calling attention to their feelings of emotional deprivation, together with the unhappy sense of a childhood and adolescence oversha dowed by the parental divorce, their hope of achieving permanence in their own future marriages, and their fearful expectations that these relationships are likely to fail as their parents' marriages failed. The continued emotional centrality of the relationship with the noncustodial father emerged strongly for girls and boys of all ages, irrespective of geographical distance, the remarriage of the custodial mother, or visita tion patterns over the postdivorce decade. We turn here to a particular conjoining of psychological and economic factors, to an unexpected finding of a downward economic and social

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