Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in their Own Marriages

by Nicholas H. Wolfinger

Growing up in a divorced family leads to a variety of difficulties for adult offspring in their own partnerships. One of the best known and most powerful is the divorce cycle, the transmission of divorce from one generation to the next. This book examines how the divorce cycle has transformed family life in contemporary America by drawing on two national data sets. Compared to people from intact families, the children of divorce are more likely to marry as teenagers, but less likely to wed overall, more likely to marry people from divorced families, more likely to dissolve second and third marriages, and less likely to marry their live-in partners. Yet some of the adverse consequences of parental divorce have abated even as divorce itself proliferated and became more socially accepted. Taken together, these findings show how parental divorce is a strong force in people's lives and society as a whole.

• ISBN13: 9780521616607
• Publish Date: 6 June 2005 (first published 1 January 2005)
• Publish Status: Active
• Out of Print: 12 April 2023
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Cambridge University Press
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 194
• Language: English

Reviews

[Briana @ Pages Unbound]

Vaguely interesting, but it reminds me why I don't read many sociology books. It has one or two basic points (children of divorced parents are more likely to get divorces than children from intact families--probably due to personality traits and a transmitted belief that marriage is easily dissolved) that it repeats multiple times. The author also continuously points out what are NOT reasons for the divorce cycle, even though it isn't clear whether anyone has put forth these reasons and there's a real need to dismiss them. On top of this, the writing is generic and often vague. There may be something of substance here, but I disagree this had to be a monograph instead of a short journal article.