Childhood Experiences in Families

Personality traits provide valid information about the intimate connections people will experience and share, and about whether their relationship will thrive or dissolve. But even the best personality tests cannot fully capture the complexity of anyone’s character, much less who he or she is going to be in a relationship. Most of us recognize implicitly that who we are as individuals, and presumably as relationship partners, comes from how we were raised and nurtured. How are the relationships we form in adulthood related to our early family relationships? How might such associations come about? In exploring these questions, we summarize what relationship scientists have learned about how each new generation in a family partially resembles the preceding one.

We look to the family as the context for negotiating the problems of continuity and change, of individuality and integration, between and within generations in ways that allow the continuous recreation of society.”

—Bengtson, Biblarz, & Roberts (2002, p. 168)

Maybe you’ve had this experience. You are dating someone, generally having a great time getting to know your partner, while also trying to figure out what kind of person he is and whether the two of you have any kind of long-term future together. Your relationship develops to the point where you meet his family, and after just a few minutes with them, many things become clear: Your partner has a goofy sense of humor because his father has a goofy sense of humor! Your partner likes to hug you in public because his parents can’t keep their hands off each other! Your partner is a lovable nerd because he spent the last 12 years playing Trivial Pursuit every Friday night with his family! Apart from whether you want these people to be your in-laws, you now have some new insights about who your partner is and how he came to be that way.

We learn a great deal about couples by studying the families in which the two people were raised. Social scientists call the family you were raised in your family of origin. The influences your family of origin have on who you are as a person, as well as on who you are as a relationship partner later in life, are referred to as intergenerational transmission effects, because experiences are passed along, or transmitted from one generation (parents) to the next one (children). As you will learn below, some of the most significant of these effects arise when families dissolve (as a result of divorce, for example) and then reappear in some other form.

Family Transitions and the Well-Being of Children

Of all the changes occurring in families in developed countries over the past century, few have attracted as much attention as the rise in divorce, and for good reason. Although the divorce rate has declined slightly since the early 1980s, even today about half of all first marriages—and an even higher proportion of remarriages—end in divorce or permanent separation (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002; Copen, Daniels, Vespa, & Mosher, 2012). Not all divorces involve children, of course, yet it is staggering to realize that more than 1 million children experience the divorce of their parents every year in the United States. Before they become young adults, about 40 percent of all children will see their parents divorce (Bumpass, 1990; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1998). In addition, children with unmarried parents face even higher rates of family instability (Kennedy & Bumpass, 2008). Therefore, when considering intergenerational transmission effects, or aspects of families that influence personal development, we pay a lot of attention to the termination of legal marriage—divorce—and the end of relationships more generally, which we will refer to as relationship dissolution.

I couldn’t remember a time when I had been content. I still can’t. And compared to my divorce-free peers, I have needed more time and space to grow. I had more work to do: I had to overcome the past and create a path for myself. For the most part, my friends with divorced parents had contended with their situations. But I couldn’t get over it because for years and years there seemed to be no real end, no closure.”

—Priluck, Split: Stories from a Generation Raised on Divorce (2002, p. 64)

When discussing divorce and dissolution, it’s important to remember that experiences vary dramatically for different people and families. No two divorces are the same, and two children in the same family can respond differently to the end of their parents’ relationship. In addition, relationship dissolution is usually a process that gradually unfolds over time, rather than an event that happens suddenly and is then resolved. Even with all the variety and complexity of different family situations, five key conclusions have emerged from research on how parental conflict and relationship dissolutions affect individuals as they develop through childhood to adolescence and into adulthood.

First, the adverse effects of relationship discord and divorce on children are evident in a range of areas, including academic achievement, conduct and behavior, psychological adjustment, self-esteem, and social relationships (Amato & Keith, 1991).

Second, the magnitude of these effects can be interpreted in different ways. Studies show that parental divorce approximately doubles the risk of adverse consequences for the children (e.g., McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994; Simons, 1996). This sounds ominous, especially to those whose parents divorced, but it does not mean that divorce guarantees unhappiness in children. In fact, although about 20–30 percent of children from divorced families experience adverse effects, about 10–15 percent of children from intact marriages do so as well. This means that children from these two groups are far more alike than different, and that most children—regardless of their family background—can be found in the normal or healthy range of functioning (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002).

Third, children are affected because a divorce jeopardizes the family’s economic circumstances, compromises the parents’ mental health, reduces the amount and quality of the child’s contact with one parent (typically the father), and therefore in many ways makes the family vulnerable to new kinds of stresses. For example, raising a family in two households is more expensive than doing so in one home, and situations that were managed easily before divorce—family get-togethers, or one parent moving on to a better job in a new location—can be a source of conflict after the parents have separated. Despite the best intentions, the quality of parenting often suffers following a divorce, and family instability increases the chances that a child will not receive the emotional support and guidance he or she needs (Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992; Simons, 1996). Ongoing conflict between parents and other family transitions—moving to a new home or school, for example, or adjusting to a stepmother or stepfather—can undermine the child’s adjustment following a divorce (e.g., Buchanan, Maccoby, & Dornbush, 1996). These adverse effects are offset when children use active coping skills, avoid blaming themselves for the divorce, and develop supportive relationships with parents, step-parents, peers, and other family members (Amato, 2000; Emery, 1999).

Fourth, divorce and dissolution are not the only family challenges affecting children. Children being raised in emotionally distressed homes can have difficulties in the absence of divorce, particularly when parental conflicts are not being addressed or properly resolved (Cummings & Davies, 1994; Grych & Fincham, 2001). You’re probably not surprised to learn that in families where the parents eventually separate or divorce, children show behavior problems—being verbally hostile, or becoming sad and withdrawn—long before the breakup actually occurs (Cherlin et al., 1991). Yet the same appears to be true even if a separation or divorce never takes place. Looking over a longer time span in continuously intact marriages, sociologists Paul Amato and Alan Booth (1997) showed that children exposed to higher levels of parental conflict in adolescence had lower self-esteem, happiness, and life satisfaction in early adulthood compared to children exposed to lower levels of parental conflict. In the context of the dependence regulation model, we noted how low self-esteem can weaken a relationship; here we can see that those same feelings of insecurity and low self-worth might stem from exposure to parents who are struggling to maintain their own relationship. This is a good example of an intergenerational transmission effect.

Fifth, the psychological health of adult children depends on a complex combination of whether the parents divorced and what the marriage was like before the divorce (e.g., Amato, Loomis, & Booth, 1995; Jekielek, 1998). Figure 6.6 graphs the psychological well-being of nearly 700 27-year-olds in 1997, in relation to whether their parents had divorced at some point between 1980 and 1997, and how much conflict there was in the marriage during the same period. As you can see, the well-being of adult children is lowest when marriages very low in discord end in divorce and when marriages very high in discord do not end in divorce (Amato et al., 1995). Not surprisingly, children are better off when a troubled marriage is terminated.

FIGURE 6.6 Divorce and the psychological well-being of children. The association between marital discord and the psychological health of adult children varies depending on whether the parents eventually divorce. In this study, children had lower levels of well-being when marital discord was very low and the parents divorced, and when marital discord was very high and the parents did not divorce. (Source: Adapted from Amato et al., 1995.)

You may be surprised to learn about the harmful consequences of ending marriages that don’t have much conflict (see Figure 6.6). One reason is that unexpected divorces strike children particularly hard in the short term and undercut their capacity to develop trusting relationships over the long term. If dissolving low-conflict marriages and maintaining high-conflict marriages can both be harmful to the well-being of children, what does this tell us? What are the implications for clinical interventions and constructive social policies? Certainly these findings suggest that preventing divorce is not necessarily a good way to strengthen children’s well-being, and that promoting nurturing, low-conflict, two-parent families is a better way to reach this goal.

How Childhood Experiences Influence Later Relationships

As we’ve seen, people raised in different family environments respond in various ways. Parental conflict and marital dissolution contribute to these variations, and the differences are evident in childhood and adulthood. These are important conclusions because they justify our focus on families and personal histories as a source of why people vary in how they approach and navigate intimate relationships, and because they help us see that a complete understanding of intimate relationships begins not when two people meet, but when their parents meet and create a new family. How do early family experiences reveal themselves later in life, as people form relationships and contemplate starting families of their own?

First, children with turbulent family backgrounds are more cautious toward relationships and are more accepting of divorce. Some studies show that children of divorce marry earlier than others not exposed to their parents’ divorce, perhaps reflecting their desire to leave difficult family situations (e.g., McLeod, 1991). Other studies demonstrate that children of divorce are more likely to live together without marrying, and to delay getting married, suggesting they are just as motivated to form partnerships as children from intact families but are more pessimistic about marriage as the means of accomplishing this goal (Tasker & Richards, 1994). Further evidence for parental divorce reducing adult children’s commitment to marriage comes from studies showing that unhappily married children with divorced parents are more likely to contemplate divorce as an option than are equally unhappy children from intact family backgrounds (Amato & DeBoer, 2001). Differences between individuals from various family backgrounds seem to be magnified “when the going gets tough” in their own relationships. How much they get magnified is a matter of debate, as Box 6.2 illustrates.

Box 6.2

Spotlight on . . .

Science and the Politics of Divorce

The state of the American family can be a controversial political issue, and debates over the effects of divorce involve views on whether the family is deteriorating or merely evolving as a social institution. Politically conservative people tend to view divorce (and other shifts away from two-parent families) as undermining the foundations of society, whereas the politically liberal are more accepting of divorce and the emergence of diverse family forms. What does science have to contribute to this debate? Consider the conclusions drawn from the following two long-term studies of divorce.

In 2000, clinical practitioners Judith S. Wallerstein, Julia M. Lewis, and Sandra Blakeslee published The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study. In this book, they wrote:

At each developmental stage divorce is experienced anew in different ways. In adulthood it affects personality, the ability to trust, expectations about relationships, and ability to cope with change. . . . The impact of divorce hits them most cruelly as they go in search of love, sexual intimacy, and commitment. Their lack of inner images of a man and a woman in a stable relationship . . . badly hobbles their search, leading them to heartbreak and even despair. . . . Their fear of abandonment, betrayal, and rejection mounted when they found themselves having to disagree with someone they loved. . . . All had trouble dealing with differences or even moderate conflict in their close relationships. (p. 298)

In 2002, developmental psychologist Mavis Hetherington and writer John Kelly published For Better or for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered. In this book, they wrote:

The adverse effects of divorce and remarriage are still echoing in some divorced families and their offspring twenty years after divorce, but they are in the minority. The vast majority of young people from these families are reasonably well adjusted and coping reasonably well in relationships with their families, friends, and intimate partners. . . . Most parents and children see the divorce as having been for the best, and have moved forward with their lives. (p. 252)

How could experts disagree so profoundly about whether divorce has lasting effects on children? How could one analysis sound a grim warning about the lasting effects of divorce, while the other depicts divorce as a serious but manageable crisis that most families resolve and put behind them? One answer can be found in the methods the two studies used. The Wallerstein team emphasized intensive interviews, conducted at several points with a small, nonrandom sample of families undergoing divorce; they did not use a control group of intact families studied over the same interval. The Hetherington team used standardized questionnaires and direct observation with large samples of families, including those who were divorced, intact, and remarried.

The differing methods tilt this comparison decidedly in favor of the Hetherington study, particularly because it shows that some children from intact marriages, generally overlooked in the Wallerstein study, can encounter difficulties much like those of children from divorced families. However, we cannot dismiss the Wallerstein study. It provides a rich portrait of individuals as they struggle to form relationships in adulthood, and in several respects it supports key findings from the larger literature on divorce (see Amato, 2003).

Are divorce and the accompanying rise in single-parent families the source of many social ills? Or are these transitions desirable, and even beneficial, because they remove children from adverse living arrangements and give adults new opportunities for contentment and individual freedom? The answer lies somewhere in between. Sociologist Paul Amato (2000) summarizes the literature in the following way:

Both of these views represent one-sided accentuations of reality. The increase in marital instability has not brought society to the brink of chaos, but neither has it led to a golden age of freedom and self-actualization. Divorce benefits some individuals, leads others to experience temporary decrements in well-being that improve over time, and forces others on a downward cycle from which they never fully recover. (p. 1282)

Second, as they complete adolescence and begin to negotiate adulthood, children from unstable and disrupted families have less money and fewer people in their social networks, on average. For example, because children of divorced parents are more likely to drop out of high school and are less likely to attend college, they enter adulthood with fewer socioeconomic resources (e.g., McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994). Kids who have unmarried parents encounter similar challenges when their parents end their relationship, and they are at a greater risk of having trouble in school and starting a family themselves outside of marriage (Amato & Patterson, 2016). Children exposed to divorce and marital distress also tend to have less fulfilling and supportive relationships with their parents, even later in life, and father-child relationships are particularly fragile following family breakups (e.g., Zill, Morrison, & Coiro, 1993). As you might expect, having fewer socioeconomic resources can put relationships at a disadvantage, particularly when couples undergo important transitions, such as the arrival of a child, a job loss, or the diagnosis of a chronic illness.

Third, children from unstable or disrupted families experience more relationship distress and dissolution themselves. As children mature through adolescence and into adulthood, the experiences they have in their relationships can be linked to what happened in their parents’ relationship. For example, children whose parents were unhappy in marriage are likely themselves to go on to form relatively unhappy marriages (e.g., Feng, Giarrusso, Bengtson, & Frye, 1999). This tendency appears to be true regardless of the parents’ education, income, religious views, and whether they subsequently divorced (Amato & Booth, 2001). Compared to children from intact family backgrounds, children exposed to parental divorce are also more likely to divorce as adults (e.g., Glenn & Kramer, 1987). So strong are these effects that divorce in one generation has been shown to reverberate through the next generation and into the intimate relationships of grandchildren some 40 years later (Amato & Cheadle, 2005).

The Social Learning Theory View

How can we make sense of these connections between our parents’ relationships and the way we negotiate relationships as we enter adulthood ourselves? The most compelling explanation is that children learn about relationships from seeing how family members relate to one another, so the interpersonal styles they learn while growing up carry forward into adulthood to influence their own intimate relationships later. Following the principles of social learning theory (see Chapter 2), we can assume that, by observing and interacting with their parents and family members, children acquire emotional and behavioral models that then generalize to relationships outside the family (e.g., Furman & Flanagan, 1997; O’Leary, 1988). Consider the following:

• One of the longest studies of human development on record shows that children who grow up in warm and nurturing families go on to feel more closely connected to their intimate partner 60 years later. This is true partly because they navigate adulthood by being less defensive and more realistic about the challenges they face in life, and are more emotionally engaged with those challenges when managing them (Waldinger & Schulz, 2016).
• Conversely, exposure to various forms of abuse and neglect in childhood carries forward to predict the quality of newlywed marriages, including increased psychological aggression and relationship problems, and decreased trust and sexual activity (DiLillo et al., 2009). Similar studies show that childhood abuse and neglect predict less fulfilling marriages in adulthood, and that even the presence of a supportive spouse does not offset this effect (Nguyen, Karney, & Bradbury, 2017).
• When dating couples are observed discussing relationship difficulties, partners from harsh and conflicted families display less positive behavior when communicating (Maleck & Papp, 2013). This is partly because they have less self-control over their emotions and a greater tendency to hold hostile and cynical attitudes about other people in general (Simons, Simons, Landor, Bryant, & Beach, 2014).
• In observational studies of married couples discussing relationship problems, individuals with a history of parental divorce are more likely to disagree, express disrespect and disdain for their partner, and withdraw in unproductive ways from the conversation (e.g., Sanders, Halford, & Behrens, 1999) (Figure 6.7).

FIGURE 6.7 Parental divorce and expressing disagreement. In this study, compared to women and men with intact parents, those with divorced parents express more disagreement and invalidation toward their partner when discussing relationship problems. When their partner is speaking, women and men with divorced parents show more negative facial expressions and gestures as listeners. The percentages represent the speaking intervals of the specified behaviors. (Source: Adapted from Sanders, Halford, & Behrens, 1999.)

In short, social learning theory encourages us to think of families as a kind of training ground for the next generation of intimate relationships. According to this view, who we are as intimate partners is shaped by the ways our parents managed their emotions and conversations while we were growing up. And the effects of these experiences are apparent, even to outside observers, in the way we behave and communicate with our partners today.

MAIN POINTS

• Feelings of closeness and intimacy are fundamentally important to the well-being of parents and their children. When these feelings are threatened, the emotional and psychological development of children, as well as their relationships as adults, can be affected.
• Understanding how people manage their interpersonal lives in adulthood requires information about the family relationships they were exposed to when growing up.
• The family of origin perspective highlights how people are molded by family events (e.g., parental divorce, parental remarriage) and family processes (e.g., parental conflict, the quality of parent-child relationships following divorce).
• Stable, warm family relationships promote healthy interpersonal relationships later in life, compared to unstable, harsh family relationships. At the same time, the effects of family upbringing on relationships later in life are small and varied; many people who grow up with conflicted or divorced parents experience few lasting scars.
• Social learning theory helps explain how early childhood relationships show some continuity with later relationships. Exposure to relationships within the family—between our parents, between us and our parents, between us and our siblings—demonstrate lessons about intimacy and social connection that carry forward into the partnerships formed in adolescence and adulthood.

Glossary

• family of origin
  The family in which a person was raised in childhood and adolescence.
• intergenerational transmission effects
  The characteristics of one’s family of origin that carry forward in time to influence intimate relationships during adolescence and adulthood.