Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly (Landscapes of Childhood Series) by Gary W. Ladd

Author:Gary W. Ladd [Ladd, Gary W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2007-04-06T04:00:00+00:00

By the 1990s the number of studies reporting on large representative samples of children who had experienced divorce was sufficient to enable researchers to conduct meta-analyses of the findings on children’s outcome. One particularly important contribution was a meta-analysis by Amato and Keith (1991) that established a point of very general significance. This concerned individual differences in children’s response to parental separation and the constellation of events that preceded and followed the family change. The focus of the great majority of studies had been on the average prevalence of children’s problems following parental separation. They documented that children whose parents separated showed, on average, higher rates of adjustment problems (such as behavior and emotional problems, school failure) than those who had not experienced these transitions. But as Amato (1994) pointed out, although the prevalence of problems was on average double that of children in families that had not gone through such transitions, these average effects were small, and variation among children in their response to family change was great. This established that the key questions that need to be answered are, which children are particularly vulnerable? And which factors in the children’s lives increase the risk of problems following family transitions or act to protect children?

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