Beyond the Average Divorce provides marriage and family scholars and students a rich depiction of how children and adults of all ages respond to diverse divorce experiences. Rather than emphasizing means and averages in looking at “typical” family reactions to divorce, authors David H. Demo and Mark A. Fine emphasize variability and change over time in the pre-divorce, divorce, and post-divorce process. The book's three parts explore theoretical and methodological tools for studying divorce, the divorce process and its multiple pathways, and future directions in research.

Key Features

  • Includes cutting-edge research on how children are affected by multiple transitions in family structure and parenting arrangements during the divorce process
  • Covers the most common causes of divorce and how the family environment deteriorates during the years leading up to divorce
  • Provides easy-to-understand descriptions and examples of how specific research methods can be used to study divorce
  • Offers a dynamic theoretical model of divorce and how it is experienced by family members in a wide variety of family situations
  • Discusses policy implications as well as directions for future theoretical, research, and clinical work in this vital area

Beyond the Average Divorce is intended as a core textbook for use in upper-level undergraduate or graduate courses in Family Stress and Divorce, Dysfunctional Families, Sociology of the Family, and Couples, Marriage, and Family Counseling.

Adults' and Children's Experience of Multiple Family Structure Transitions

Adults' and children's experience of multiple family structure transitions

For many families, divorce marks yet another change in a series of changes in family structure. Postdivorce family trajectories take many forms as most formerly married adults enter into new intimate relationships, a rapidly increasing proportion of divorced adults cohabit with a partner or a series of partners, many remarry (often following cohabitation), and a majority of second (and higher order) remarriages end in redivorce. Likewise, for many children, parental divorce signals the first of several family structure transitions as parents enter and exit the household with the formation and dissolution of each cohabiting and remarital relationship. In this chapter, we review our knowledge base regarding how adults ...

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