Articlehybrid2018

Reconciling Mixed Findings on Children’s Adjustment Following High-Conflict Divorce

Reine C. van der Wal · Catrin Finkenauer · Margreet M. Visser

64 citations0/0 files storedJournal of Child and Family Studies

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Family Dynamics and Relationships Child and Adolescent Psychosocial and Emotional Development Attachment and Relationship Dynamics

Abstract

Despite important advances, empirical evidence regarding the impact of divorce on children is mixed, ranging widely in its conclusions regarding the intensity, chronicity, and harmfulness of parental divorce on their post-divorce adjustment. To explain the broad range of findings, we suggest that successful and dysfunctional adjustment following parental divorce may not be mutually exclusive. Rather, they may be partly independent, and children may report divorce-specific traumatic feelings as well as a relatively high post-divorce adjustment. We examined these suggestions in a sample of 142 six-to-18-year-old Dutch children whose parents were involved in high-conflict divorces. Children completed self-reported measures of post-divorce traumatic impact and adjustment. Consistent with our suggestion, children showed, on average, both high levels of trauma and high levels of post-divorce adjustment. Nevertheless, illustrating domain spill-over, at the individual level, children who experienced more traumatic impact of the divorce also reported lower levels of post-divorce adjustment. These results suggest that high-conflict divorce represents a risk for traumatic impact, and, at the same time, children demonstrate resilience. Future research examining which children are more susceptible to trauma and/or resilience over time would be promising.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

References

2001Ordinary magic: Resilience processes in development.1979Impact of Event Scale: A Measure of Subjective Stress 2004Loss, Trauma, and Human Resilience: Have We Underestimated the Human Capacity to Thrive After Extremely Aversive Events?2001Measuring Global Self-Esteem: Construct Validation of a Single-Item Measure and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale 2000The Consequences of Divorce for Adults and Children 2010Stress and Health: Major Findings and Policy Implications 2010Research on Divorce: Continuing Trends and New Developments 2010Developmental cascades

Cited by

2019“Keeping balance”, “Keeping distance” and “Keeping on with life”: Child positions in divorced families with prolonged conflicts 2020Family Communication, Adaptation to Divorce and Children’s Maladjustment: The Moderating Role of Coparenting 2021Parental Conflicts and Posttraumatic Stress of Children in High-Conflict Divorce Families 2021Children of high conflict divorce: Exploring the experiences of primary school teachers 2021Longitudinal associations between sibling relationship quality and child adjustment after divorce

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.