Parental Marital Quality, Parental Divorce, and Relations with Parents

The quality of relationships between adult children and their parents has been shown to have implications for psychological well-being for both generations (Umberson, 1992) and for the amount of support provided in times of need (Cooney (b) focus on the young adult's perspective; (c) determine which relationships are most at risk; and (d) increase our understanding of the mechanisms by which the parents' marriage affects adult offspring-parent relationships. PRIOR RESEARCH There are two streams of research that help inform the direction of our inquiry. One is from the child developmental literature. The second is research on the long-term effects of parental divorce and poor marital quality on adult offspring. Research on children finds that parental divorce is negatively related to the quality of parent-child relations. Hetherington, Cox, and Cox (1982) found that recently divorced custodial mothers were less affectionate toward their children and used harsher punishment than did mothers in intact two-parent families. While there was some improvement with the passage of time, tension persisted in mothers' relationships with sons. In relation to fathers, research consistently shows that contact between noncustodial fathers and children declines over time (Furstenberg Seltzer Peterson & Zill, 1986) have also found stronger associations between parental marital conflict and poorer relations with fathers than mothers. Studies on the long-term effects of parental divorce and marital quality on adult offspring have seldom examined intergenerational relations. Amato and Booth (1991), drawing on a national sample of married people, examined the way in which the amount of contact with parents was related to parental divorce and, in cases in which no divorce occurred, retrospective accounts of parental marital quality. …