The Family and Divorce

As promised, here is something for all those revising the family and divorce. An ESRC information sheet for AS and A level sociology students makes several points about divorce and the family which provide a useful corrective or update to many textbook treatments. A bit more on this topic follows tomorrow.

The ESRC makes the following key points, based on research by Dr Bren Neale and Dr Jennifer Flowerdew of the University of Leeds.

•It is wrong to assume that multiple changes n a child’s life after divorce are necessarily detrimental. What’s important is the nature of the changes (sometimes divorce may benefit children), and their cumulative effect that are significant.

•Divorce should not be regarded as the central factor in definining children and determining their life chances after a marriage breaks up. E.g. class, race, gender are still key structures and are of greater significance.

•Relationships between young people and their parents are played out in a variety of complex ways. What may be more important than whether a marriage has broken up, is the degree to which there is a flexible and supportive environment which provides young people with a fair degree of control.

•A study conducted by the ESRC in Leeds found that divorce should not be seen as the central issue in young people’s lives. Many of the yong people in the Leeds study faced a range of personal or family related changes that followed parental separation, but which were not caused by it, including e.g. issues are schooling, economic hardship, redundancy, and long term illness.