Separating Together: How Divorce Transforms Families

About the Book

The view offered in this book is to look at divorce not as a catastrophe, but an event that changes families and family members. Using research they conducted with over 100 families the authors describe what the experience of parental separation and divorce is like for the various family members. Case studies and quotations from interviews illustrate how different families handle the process, and what a different experience it is for adults and children in the same household. The book emphasizes the factors that make parental divorce harder and easier on family members, and eveluates for and against many common beliefs.

Table of Contents:
Part I: The Psychological Experience of Parental Divorce.Changing Our Minds about Parental Divorce. Studying Family Transformation: Research Designs and the Family Changes Project. The Parents' Stories: The End of a Marriage and a New Beginning. The Children's Stories. Part II How Individual Family Members Adapt to Parental Separation. Parents Adjusting after the Separation: What Helped? Beyond the "Effects of Divorce on Children": Uncovering and Understanding Complexity. Part III Family Dyads, Adjustment and Change. The Mother-Child Relationship: Insider and Outsider Views. When the Conflict Continues: Implications of Parental Conflict in the Postseparation Family. Patterns of Conflict and Parenting in Divorcing Couples. Part IV Parental Divorce as a Family Transformation. Families after Separation: Changing Systems. Wise Families, Wise Changes.

About the Author :
Abigail J. Stewart, PhD, is Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, where she is also Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Widely published, her research has focused on the psychology of women's lives; personality; and adaptation to change.

Anne P. Copeland, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology at Boston University. She is currently studying how family process and national culture affect adolescents' identity and adjustment.

Nia Lane Chester, PhD, is Professor of Psychology and Dean for Learning and Assessment at Pine Manor College in Brookline, MA. A former Radcliffe Research Scholar and recipient of a DuPont grant from the Women's College Coalition, her interests include role and personality interaction, stress and coping patterns in adults and children, and women and work.

Janet E. Malley, PhD, is Senior Research Associate at the Murray Research Center of Radcliffe College. Her research interests are in the area of adult development, focusing in particular on how the process of development may be mediated by work and family roles.

Nicole B. Barenbaum, PhD, is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her research focuses on the history of personality psychology in the U.S.

Review :
"In this book Abigail Stewart and her colleagues report on their magnificent study of how divorce transforms families. The longitudinal study--funded by NIMH and conducted as a true collaboration--is simply the best study in the United States on the issue of divorce. Its provocative findings will surely change how we think about divorce and its aftermath. In this landmark book is an enormous amount of information--and great wisdom--that should benefit anyone who studies divorce and everyone who has been touched by divorce." --Faye Crosby, PhD, Professor of Psychology, Smith College

"Imagine--a book about the psychological effects of divorce without a political ax to grind! Sagely treating divorce as a complex process rather than a cataclysmic event or a sin, this book judiciously charts the challenges and pitfalls divorcing parents and their children confront, as well as the growth many achieve in the process. This sober, wise, and humane book is less interested in moralistic hand-wringing than in fostering better outcomes for the millions of lives divorce transforms. The perfect antidote to the doomsday discourse on divorce." --Judith Stacey, author, In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age.

"One of the strengths of the book is the consideration of how different members of the family can be 'out of synch' in the process of adjusting to the separation....Also welcome in the literature on divorce is the challenge to popular negative myths....Stewart and her colleagues have written an important book, and it will provide useful and understandable information on a complex topic to family scholars and practitioners, as well as to families searching for hopeful and helpful guidance." --"Journal of Social and Personal Relationships"
"This book presents quantitative, qualitative, and narrative data compelling in its rejection of the old broken-home image of divorce....One strength of the study is its inclusion of fathers....This book would be useful to primary care providers doing family counseling, as well as family therapists in helping patients frame the decision to divorce as an opportunity rather than a failure. It may also be useful to teachers, judges, psychologists, and others interested in dispelling the myths around the long-term effects of divorce." --"Family Medicine"
"A valuable addition to the growing literature on divorcing families." --"Choice"