Alyssa Lee
Professor Gruszkos
PSY 230-01PR
03/20/18
Rising Divorce Rates in America
Institutional Affiliation
Date’
Introduction
Dissolution of marriage, which is also referred to as divorce, refers to marriage termination or a marital union, the reorganizing or cancelling of duties and responsibilities of marriage that are legal, thus breaking matrimonial bonds between couples that are married under a country’s or state’s rule of law. The laws of divorce vary or are different around the globe, but in most states, the act demands the legal process through an authority or court. This may involve issues of the time in parenting; spousal support, visiting of the child, child custody, property distribution, debt division as well as support for the child who was born in the time the couples were together. In many nations, the law requires monogamy, hence divorce permits each of the former partners to get engaged and marry another person. However, where polyandry is illegal, and polygyny is legal, divorce permits the female partner to get married to another person. Some countries around the world do not allow separation, and they include the Vatican City, Philippines and the British Crown Dependency of Sark. In America, the divorce of rates has continually hiked up, affecting the development of the current generation in a way that is different from parents as well as grandparents.
The past 50+ years have seen divorce rate in America increase so much. Among US adults who are aged 50 years and above, the rate at which divorce is happening is double as compared to the past centuries. Before 1970, a separation was not standard, and it was challenging to find such cases. A fault was always needed-one of the partners must have committed a grave sin or crime to enable them to be justified to have a divorce. Such crimes could include; cruelty, adultery, intoxication, abandonment or another cause that made it just to make the marriage come to an end. In the 1950s, in some states, No-fault divorce became an option (Weitzman, 1985). This meant that couples did not need to prove that one partner was at fault. The couples could declare the marriage to have broken down. By 1970, nearly all states had come up with laws that allowed no-fault divorces. Many of the states also put in place laws that hugely minimized the separation time, making it faster and easier for couples to divorce. The so passed laws had a significant effect on the rates of divorce. Between 1940 and 1965, the divorce rate stood at ten divorces for every 1000 women who were married. However, by the year 1979, the rates of divorce had doubled. Since 1980, the trends of marriage dissolution have not in any way continued on paths that are straightforward as the story has grown to be complicated every day. The effects of the social revolution which happened in the 1960s and 1970s are currently felt disproportionately by the less educated and weak, while the rich, who set off in the first place these transformations, have been able to reclaim more stable and healthier habits of marriage life. This current imbalance leaves Americas political and cultural elites less well adjusted to the extent of social dysfunction in much of their society. The imbalance also leaves the most Americans who are vulnerable, more so children living in working-class and poor communities, a situation that is even worse than they would otherwise be.
Divorce has grown since then, and this is attributed to various reasons. One of the most significant reasons is that women have continually become a strong presence in the workforce. A massive number of women no longer depend on their husbands for support. This independence by women allowed them to break up from marriages that are unhappy since they know they are capable of providing for themselves. Divorce has become more acceptable since the fault and guilt of the old divorce laws are gone. For the past 50 years, many couples have separated making it become a regular part of life. There are also other changes that have contributed to the high rise in divorce rates in America. One of these changes is cohabitation (Bumpass, L & Lu, 2000). Living together has over the past years become acceptable. Recent research shows that couples that stay together before they marry each other are more likely to part in their later life. Another change is that someone who is divorced and later remarries is prone to be divorced again. The third change that explains why divorce increased is that children who come from parents who are divorced are likely to be divorced once they get married. This translates to that as the number of parents who are divorced increases, so does the number of their children that get divorced by their couple. Since 1974, almost a million children per year in America have witnessed their parents’ divorce. This is a greater number as compared to the as compared to the one witnessed by their parents and grandparents. Children who are exposed to these divorces are two to three times likely to suffer from psychological or social pathologies than their peers who are in marriages that are intact. According sociologists Gary Sandefur and Sara McLanahan, 31% of children who come from divorced parents, drop out of high school contrary to 13% of children who come from families that are intact. Their research also shows that 33% of girls who are at their adolescent stage and whose parents had divorced ended up been teen mothers as compared to 11% of young girls from families that were continuously married. The research by these sociologists together with their colleagues also revealed that 11% of boys from parents that had divorced ended up spending their time in prison before attaining the 32-years mark a percentage that is higher than that of boys from intact families that stood at 5%.
Research by another sociologist namely Andrew Cherlin indicates that after the divorce, the children who parents remarry are wounded enough. They do not have huge levels of well-being when compared to the ones from families with lone-parent. The common consequences of the divorce revolution for the recent generation are severely striking. Taking into account both non-marital childbearing and divorce, Paul Amato, who is a sociologist puts in estimation the current family stability compared to that of the past years when the children’s parents and grandparents used to live. In the estimation, if the United States, enjoyed today the same level of stability in families as it did in 1960, the country would experience 750,000 lesser children repeating grades. The school suspensions would also be 1.2 million fewer, with acts of teenage delinquency being estimated as 500,000 fewer and there would be 600,000 fewer kids getting or receiving therapy. If family stability in America were as it was in 1960, the number of suicide attempts each year would be 70,000 fewer. The research concludes that if the clock of family-stability was turned back just a few decades, the lives of many children could significantly improve.
The divorce revolution that occurred in the 1960s and 1970 left behind a negative poisonous legacy. In America, marriage is becoming a preserve of the middle and upper classes as well as the highly educated. Nowadays, very few poor and working-class Americans are marrying since marriage is currently seen as a sort of status symbol. This means that it is a sign that a couple has reached both financially and economically, or it lies within the speculated range of the American Dream. Educational lines and class have increasingly divided America making divorce decline in people with college degrees while increasing in those who do not have the college degrees. The recent generation in America, consisting people who are younger than 50, are facing a high divorce rate. The rate is estimated to be about twice as high as it is for people aged 50 and older. The divorce rate has also hiked for adults with 40-49 years since 1990. However, this is not to the extent of those aged 50 aged above. The trend also has shown some decline for people between age25-39, coming from 30 people per 1000 married couples in 1990 to 24 in 2015. This fall is attributed to the fact that many younger people nowadays are abandoning marriage and prefer doing it at later years when they are aged quite enough. In this generation, those who prefer marrying at a younger age are those who college educated and research has shown that college-educated fellows have a low divorce rate as compared to those who are not educated. The hiking divorce rate for adults with ages 50 and above is attributed to the Baby Boomers who are ageing, who are the higher number of this age group. Baby Boomers are the same people who had an incidence of unprecedented divorce in the years of 1980 and 1990 (Ruggles, 1997). At this time they were still in their 20s and 30s, and now they are aged 40, 50 and 60s. These Baby Boomers were the people responsible extreme marital instability rise after 1970. Despite them being in their middle-ages, the pattern of marital instability continues and is still very high.
During the 1970s, a couple could get married at a younger age of 25 and end up breaking by the time they are 30. However the trend seems to have changed nowadays, a couple can decide to stay together for several years and part their ways once things don’t work out as they had hoped and planned. Scholars have estimated America’s divorce rate to be about 50% and this percentage has arrived through four main ways. These ways which scholars have continued to use to measure divorce rate include; the Crude Divorce Rate, Percentage Ever Divorced, Refined Divorce Rate and Cohort Measure Rate. There are a variety of generational life factors that influence today’s generation divorce rate when compared to that of parents and grandparents. These factors affect the numbers from one decade to the other, and this is because specific external factors and qualities differ as well as vary among generations. These factors include; the strength of jobs, robustness of the local and national economy, overall attendance and graduation in colleges, sexual mores and cohabitation rates.
Before the 1960s, the older institutional model of marriage took the more significant part of popular consciousness; the marriage was the only venue that was legitimate for getting children and raising children, having sex and having fun in an intimate relationship. By then, Americans looked marriage as a unique institution that had many more goods than an emotional involvement of a high-quality. Since they valued it, all people regardless of their socioeconomic status assessed to get married and stay in the marriage for a lifetime without divorcing. Currently, the institutional model has weakened over the American adults’ lives, children, intimacy and sex can be committed outside a marriage (Stevenson, B & Wolfers, 2007). Nowadays, what remains essential and unique to marriage is the prospect of that emotional bond of high-quality, that is, the soul-mate model. This has resulted in disproportionate appeal in marriage to couples that are better-educated, wealthy. This is because those who are less affluent and less educated do not have financial, social and emotional resources to enjoy the soul-mate marriage of high-quality. The high rising divorce rates in marriages in America brings a lot of problems socially. The divorce divide in poor and working-class communities in America has been the cause and fuelled inequality and poverty.
The increased divorce rates in America have resulted or rather influenced the development of children and young adults today. A considerable number of children have been brought up by single parents after their parents parted ways after disagreements in their union forcing everyone to go their ways. Single parent-brought up children are most likely to be lured into dangerous behaviors like early prostitution, relationships and early marriages. This is because the care and attention given to them by a single parent is minimized and cannot be compared to the attention given to the children whose families are still in terms and intact. For example, the Kaiser Family Foundation did a study and found out that children who come from homes that have a single parent spent 45 minutes more every day watching television when compared with children from two-parent homes. This has enormous impacts on the behavior of the child as well as educational performance. Many are the times that what they watch on the television is not meant for young-aged people. This distorts their thinking as well as morals, and they may end up acting and following what they see on the screens. The chances are high that children from single-parent families may not develop a good understanding of family and marriage life because they are used to a single parent (Painter, G & Levine, 2000). This may in return negatively influence the way they view their marital future and end resulting in a negative vision. Divorce has had significant negative impacts on children and young adults in America and all over the globe. It constantly leads to conflict management methods that are destructive, faded social competence among children and degraded sense of masculinity and femininity for young adults.
A divorce between couples who have children does not only occur between them but also bring forward a divorce between parents and their children. The relationship between children and their parents deteriorates depending on the parent each child loves most (Hetherington, E & Arasteh, 2014). This brings forward a mix up of feelings since some children may prefer living with their father as opposed to their mother and vice versa. Children from divorced homes receive little attention as to when compared with those from intact homes, and this weakens the parent-children relationship. Separation and divorce among parents bring forward more overprotective parenting and less caring during the teenage adolescent years. It makes it more children difficult to trust their parents and may end up affecting the psychological well-being of the young adults. Emotional weakness and well-being of children is another influence marriage divorce brings forward to children. The relationship and closeness between children and their parents diminish since there is a created distance between the two. For example, young adults report negative relationships with their fathers once the two parents break and this may have consequences for the future of the child. This negative relationship may arise due to strictness, the father molesting and beating the children or even at in cases where the fathers are drunkards, sexual molesting may also arise (Amato, 2000). Boys, who live with their mothers after a divorce, become more hostile when compared to girls for years after that. In a case where girls are living with their fathers after divorce, they are worse than boys. The rising divorce rates in America which are different from how parents and grandparents divorced leads to children leaving their homes early before they mature enough to take care of themselves. Many of these children end up doing anything to earn a single dine to survive. Some of them due to depression end up engaging themselves in illegal practices such as drug trafficking and early use of drugs hence destroying their future.
In America, "gray divorce" has taken the greater percentage whereby certain age groups are being affected by divorce more than others. Despite divorce rates declining, it is on the rise for people who are aged fifty years and above. According to Forbes, this phenomenon which is given the name ‘gray divorce’ doubled between the year 1990 and 2010. This kind of divorce can result mainly due to several reasons. For those who are aged 50 years and above, this kind of separation can be brought about by financial problems, empty nester as well as boredom. Additionally, these relationships could have lived to be flawed but taken many years of struggle before or for something to be done about it. The older generations are raising the divorce rate despite millennials doing something right to bring it down through tactics like marrying late (Schoen, R & Canudas’Romo, 2006). In America, divorce rates have changed over time, and this had led mostly to negative impacts on the development of the current generation when compared to their parents and grandparents when the rates were down, and people divorced only when it was necessary to do so. There were no many factors were contributing to divorce as compared to the current ones.
Conclusion
Every year, over a million American children and young adults face the effects of divorce of their parents. This caused harm that is irreparable to the ones involved but the most affected are the children. Although in some cases, separation may benefit some individuals, it results to a temporary reduction in an individual’s life quality and puts some people on a descending trajectory from which they might probably never fully recover.
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References
Amato, P. R. (2000). The consequences of divorce for adults and children. Journal of marriage and family, 62(4), 1269-1287.
Bumpass, L., & Lu, H. H. (2000). Trends in cohabitation and implications for children s family contexts in the United States. Population studies, 54(1), 29-41.
Hetherington, E. M., & Arasteh, J. D. (Eds.). (2014). Impact of divorce, single parenting and stepparenting on children: a case study of visual agnosia. Psychology Press.
Painter, G., & Levine, D. I. (2000). Family structure and youths' outcomes: Which correlations are causal?. Journal of Human Resources, 524-549.
Ruggles, S. (1997). The rise of divorce and separation in the United States, 1880’1990. Demography, 34(4), 455-466.
Schoen, R., & Canudas’Romo, V. (2006). Timing effects on divorce: 20th century experience in the United States. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(3), 749-758.
Stevenson, B., & Wolfers, J. (2007). Marriage and divorce: Changes and their driving forces. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 21(2), 27-52.
Weitzman, L. J. (1985). The divorce revolution: The unexpected social and economic consequences for women and children in America.