Attitudes Toward Parental Disclosures to Children and Adolescents by Divorced and Married Parents

• Author: Ashton Chapman,Kwangman Ko,Youngjin Kang,Lawrence Ganong,Marilyn Coleman
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12278
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Date: 01 December 2017

Y K University of Illinois at Springeld

L G University of Missouri–Columbia

A C Iowa State University

M C  K K University of Missouri–Columbia

Attitudes Toward Parental Disclosures to Children

and Adolescents by Divorced and Married Parents

Objective: To examine individuals’ attitudes

about parental disclosures to children.

Background: Parents’ disclosures can either

help or hinder children’s coping with family-

related stressors. Knowing what is appropriate

to disclose, however, is not always clear.

Method: We examined judgments about paren-

tal disclosures using a mixed-methods approach.

In 18 factorial vignettes, information about a

parent’s marital status and gender and a child’s

age and gender were randomly varied; a con-

venience sample of 561 individuals evaluated

the appropriateness of parental disclosures.

An open-ended question asked respondents to

explain their answers.

Results: Quantitative data indicated that child-

ren’s ages and parents’ gender affected atti-

tudes about disclosures, but parents’ marital

status and children’s gender did not. Qualita-

tive responses indicated that participants were

concerned about parental disclosures putting

children in the middle of parents’problems. Dis-

closures about sexual issues were considered

inappropriate for school-aged children but app-

ropriate for adolescents.

Department of Human Services, 316 Brookens Library,

University of Illinois at Springeld, Springeld, IL 62703

(ykang33@uis.edu).

Key Words: Children, communication, divorce,parental dis-

closures, vignettes.

Conclusion: There is consensus on evaluations

of the appropriateness of specic parental dis-

closures. Negative disclosures are perceived as

potentially harmful to offspring regardless of

parents’ marital status. Some topics are seen as

more acceptable to disclose to adolescents than

to younger children, and evaluations of specic

disclosures differ for fathers and mothers.

Implications: A better understanding of how

people evaluate parentaldisclosures may be use-

ful to family therapists, parent educators, and

others who work with families.

Parental disclosures are dened as parents’

verbal messages that reveal personal, private,

or previously unknown information to their

children (Donovan, Thompson, LeFebvre, &

Tollison, 2016). Such disclosures are impor-

tant in parent–child relationships, yet research

ndings about the effects of them on child devel-

opment and family relationships are mixed.

Parents’ messages about personal and family

matters can either help children cope with

family-related stressors or add to their stress

(Petronio, 2002). For example, ndings from

some studies suggest that parental disclosures

may be benecial for children when the disclo-

sures are intended to help children understand

family events and processes such as divorce,

remarriage, and death (Toller & McBride, 2013)

or to reduce children’s fears and uncertainty

Family Relations 66 (December 2017): 839–853 839

DOI:10.1111/fare.12278