Coping with Divorce, Single Parenting, and Remarriage: A Risk and Resiliency Perspective

Abstract

Coping with Divorce, Single Parenting, and Remarriage: A Risk and Resiliency Perspective. E. Mavis Hetherington (Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. 1999. 359 pp. ISBN 0-- 8058-3083-9. $79.97 cloth, $36.00 paper. This book is edited by E. Mavis Hetherington, long a leader in the field of divorcing families. As a follow-up to her 1988 volume, Hetherington has gathered an impressive collection of authors to present advances in the study of divorce, single parenthood, and remarriage. The majority of work is based on large-scale, federally funded grants or nationally representative surveys. The book's 14 chapters are organized into five sections: why marriages succeed or fail, how children adjust to different family structures, divorced and single-parent families, stepfamilies, and interventions. A rarity in edited books, I found no weak chapters. All were clearly written and well organized, and then provided excellent descriptions of that author's particular program of research. Although (with the exception of the final chapter on interventions) authors concentrated on their own projects rather than reviewing the field in general, the diversity of topics ensured that the reader is provided with a broad understanding of the field. A sampling of exemplary chapters includes the following: Amato's chapter on the effects of divorce on young adults embodies sound methodological practice. He first describes the theory underlying his conceptual framework, and then he utilizes structural equation modeling to evaluate that model. The chapter on African American multigenerational families (Chase-- Lansdale et al.) is one of the few that takes a cross-sectional rather than a longitudinal approach. However, the explication of the complex issues involved in describing relationships is excellent; one cannot understand these families without considering parent's age, degree of poverty, status of the father, and characteristics and interrelationships of the mother's and grandmothers' parenting. Hetherington's chapter probes the age-old question, Should we stay together for the sake of the children? She discusses the importance of level of conflict, gender, parenting style, time, and peer associations in answering this complex question. Bray's work on stepfamilies highlights the importance of longitudinal work in understanding the sleeper effect. His overview of years of research regarding the relationships among adolescents and stepparents is excellent. Several themes are apparent across chapters. One, status variables (e.g., divorced versus intact family) does predict overall differences in outcome; however, there is tremendous variability within groups. Gross differences are not as useful as an understanding of the processes involved. …