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Beyond the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce

Do People Replicate the Patterns of Marital Instability They Grew Up With?

University of Utah

Data are used from both waves of the National Survey of Families and Households to test the hypothesis that individuals who experience many parental relationship transitions will often reproduce these behaviors as adults by dissolving multiple marriages. This hypothesis is confirmed, and the findings are essentially unchanged when controlling for socioeconomic characteristics of both respondents and their families of origin. These results are consistent with the family change hypothesis, which attributes the deleterious consequences of nonintact parenting to the strain of experiencing family structure transitions rather than the state of living without a male role model or the poverty often induced by parental divorce. Finally, the findings reconceptualize the often-studied intergenerational transmission of divorce. Neither family structure of origin nor offspring marital behavior can be treated as dichotomies: Multiple family structure transitions make things worse for children, and many of these children will end more than one marriage.

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