Measuring Up? The Relationship Between Correlates of Childrens Adjustment and Both Family Law and Policy in England

• Author: Liz Trinder/Michael E. Lamb
• Position: Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work and Psychosocial Sciences/Professor of Psychology
• Pages: 1509-1537

Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work and Psychosocial Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. Professor of Psychology in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Cambridge University, UK.

Page 1509

Over the last two decades, an impressive, albeit incomplete, body of evidence has been built identifying the factors associated with children's adjustment following parental separation. At the same time, English family law and policy have changed and developed considerably for a variety of reasons. In this paper, we explore the linkages between these two developments. We consider, first, the body of evidence documenting the factors associated with adjustment and maladjustment on the part of children whose parents have separated or divorced, and second, the extent to which changing laws and policies in the United Kingdom have been guided by this literature and have helped achieve the desired outcomes for children.

Our assessment is mixed. In broad terms, developmental research has helped to drive law and policy, although other factors, including costs, ideology, and pressure groups, have also been influential. The impact of legal and policy developments on outcomes for children is harder to detect. The extent and frequency of contact between children and their non-residential parents appears to have risen over the last decade, although this probably reflects cultural as much as legal change. Perhaps the greatest success is attributable to the policy of non-intervention emphasized in the Children Act 1989, which has permitted the majority of parents to make contact arrangements without court intervention. Nevertheless, support services to assist children and parents remain underdeveloped and there continue to be significant problems in managing the small minority of cases that do go to court.

I What Children Need: A Selective Synopsis

Systematic research on early social development has flourished in the last twenty-five years, and has helped generate a much better understanding of both the normative developmental processes that define the first year of life and the roles played by parents.¹ ThePage 1510 formation of attachments to parents depends on reciprocal interactive processes that foster the ability to differentiate parents from others. Infant-parent relationships or attachments are consolidated by the middle of the first year of life and are characterized by the onset of separation anxiety and separation protest.² Even adequate levels of responsive parenting foster the formation of infant-parent attachments, although some of these relationships may be insecure.

Contrary to Bowlby's initial speculation and widespread "common sense," most infants form meaningful attachments to both of their parents at roughly the same age (six to seven months),³ even though most fathers in our culture spend less time with their infants than do mothers.⁴ This indicates that the amount of time spent together is not the only factor affecting the development of attachments. Although some threshold level of interaction may be necessary, even brief opportunities for regular interaction appear sufficient. Most infants come to "prefer" the parents who take primary responsibility for their care (typically their mothers), but this does not mean that relationships with their less-involved parents are unimportant. Although there is no evidence that the amount of time infants spend with their two parents affects the security of either attachment relationship, it does affect the relative formative importance of the two relationships. Nonetheless, both relationships remain psychologically important despite disparities in the two parents' levels of participation in child care.

The quality of both maternal and paternal behavior is reliably associated with the security of infant-parent attachment.⁵ The association between the quality of paternal behavior and the quality of infant-father attachment appears to be weaker than the parallel association between maternal behavior and the security of infant-mother attachment. However, the quality of both mother- and father- child interaction remains the most reliable correlates of individual differences in psychological, social, and cognitive adjustment inPage 1511 infancy, as well as in later childhood.⁶ Not surprisingly, therefore, children appear better adjusted when they enjoy warm positive relationships with two actively involved parents.⁷

Infants and toddlers in particular, and children more generally, need regular interaction with their "attachment figures" if their relationships are to persist and flourish.⁸ Extended separations from either parent are undesirable because they unduly stress developing attachment relationships.⁹ In addition, young children need to interact with both parents in a variety of contexts (feeding, playing, diapering, soothing, putting to bed, etc.) to ensure that the relationships are consolidated and strengthened. In the absence of such opportunities for regular interaction across a broad range of contexts, infant-parent relationships fail to develop and may instead weaken. For the same reason, it is extremely difficult to reestablish relationships between infants or young children and their parents when these relationships have been disrupted. Instead, it is considerably better to avoid such disruptions in the first place.

Common sense and scientific research thus tell us that both the dissolution of the parents' relationship and the attenuation or loss of a relationship with a parent are likely to have psychological costs. Additionally, there is substantial evidence that children in both the United States and the United Kingdom are better off psychologically and developmentally in two- rather than single-parent families.¹⁰Page 1512 Researchers agree that, on average, children growing up in fatherless families are disadvantaged relative to peers growing up in two-parent families, with respect to psychosocial adjustment, behavior and achievement at school, educational attainment, employment trajectories, income generation, involvement in anti-social and even criminal behavior, and the ability to establish and maintain intimate relationships.

Interestingly and importantly, only a minority of children in single-parent families are maladjusted; the majority evince no psychopathology or behavioral symptoms, whether or not they experience psychic pain.¹¹ Such individual differences force us to identify more precisely the ways in which divorce and single parenthood may affect children's lives and, relatedly, the factors that might account for individual differences in children's adjustment following the separation, and possibly divorce, of their parents.

Four interrelated factors appear to be especially significant. First of all, single parenthood is associated with a variety of social and financial stresses with which custodial parents must cope, largely on their own. Single-parent families are more economically stressed than two-parent families, and economic stresses or poverty appear to account (statistically speaking) for many effects of single parenthood.¹²

Secondly, because single mothers need to work more extensively outside the home than married or partnered mothers do, parents spend less time with children in single-parent families and the levels of supervision and guidance are lower and less reliable than in two-parent families.¹³ Reductions in the level and quality of parental stimulation and attention may affect achievement, compliance, and social skills while diminished supervision makes antisocial behavior and misbehavior more likely.¹⁴

Thirdly, conflict between the parents commonly precedes, emerges, or increases during the separation and divorce processes,Page 1513 and often continues beyond them. Inter-parent conflict is an important correlate of filial maladjustment just as marital harmony, its conceptual inverse, appears to be a reliable correlate of adjustment.¹⁵ The adversarial legal system tends to promote conflict around the time of divorce although both pre- and post-divorce conflict can be harmful to children. Dr. Joan B. Kelly has argued persuasively that some of the "effects of divorce" are better viewed as the effects of pre-separation marital conflict.¹⁶ Anger-based marital conflict is associated with filial aggression and externalizing behavior problems,¹⁷ perhaps because both parents and children have similar difficulty regulating the negative effects of the conflict.¹⁸

In addition, most experts agree that conflict localized around the time of separation and divorce is of less concern than conflict that was and remains an intrinsic and unresolved part of the parents' relationship and continues after their divorce.¹⁹ Similarly, conflict from which children are shielded also does not appear to affect adjustment,²⁰ whereas conflict that includes physical violence is more pathogenic than high conflict without violence.²¹

Fourth, divorce commonly disrupts one of the child's most important and enduring relationships-the one with his or her father. As Amato has shown with particular clarity, however, the bivariate associations between father absence and children's adjustment are much weaker than one might expect.²² Indeed, Amato and Gilbreth'sPage 1514 meta-analysis revealed no significant association between the frequency of father-child contact and child adjustment, largely because of the great diversity in the types of "father-present" relationships.²³ We might predict that contacts with abusive, incompetent...