133 research outputs found

    Parenting At and After Divorce: A Search for New Models

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    A Review of Surviving the Breakup: How Children and Parents Cope with Divorce by Judith S. Wallerstein and Joan Berlin Kell

    Latina\u27s experiences of shared parenting in the context of intimate partner violence: a phenomenological study

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    This dissertation presented a hermeneutic phenomenological study conducted with 12 Latina mothers who were survivors of intimate partner violence (IPV) considering or in a process of shared parenting with their former abusive partner. The purpose of this study was to explore the essence of shared parenting experiences among participants in the IPV context and examine how attachment style, adverse childhood experiences, and cultural values impacted their shared parenting decisions and processes. The study was guided by the theoretical frameworks of symbolic interactionism, intersectional feminism, and attachment. Findings indicated adverse childhood experiences and cultural values affected participants’ shared parenting decisions and processes, with all but one participant reporting they desired shared parenting for the sake of their children. Participants were fully aware of risks associated with shared parenting including psychological abuse, physical violence, and coercive control. Participants reported riskmanagement strategies, the most prevalent of which included involving a third party, often family or a trusted friend, using supervised visitation, and meeting the\ perpetrator in a public place. Given the role of attachment style in relation to shared parenting was unclear, future research should investigate the impact of attachment style and shared parenting. Additionally, assessing adverse childhood experiences and cultural values will be beneficial when combined with interview data. Due to the prevalence of IPV, culturally sensitive and trauma-informed interventions must focus on individual skills training for survivors, group therapy to help process IPV experiences and instill hope, and relational therapy with family members and loved ones to strengthen problem-solving skills and promote recovery. Furthermore, in the context of the COVID-19 global pandemic, many women reside with perpetrators due to lack of resources, so secure online platforms must be constructed to provide support and ensure women and children’s safety. Recommendations were provided for improving how the legal and judicial system recognize and respond to coercive control as a punishable form of abuse. Moreover, to improve competence among mental health practitioners working with IPV survivors, graduate programs for mental health practitioners must include general knowledge and intervention on IPV. Intervention through the educational system and the church system is also recommended. Keywords: intimate partner violence, Latinx, shared parenting, adverse childhood experiences, attachment styles, intersectional feminis

    Navigating Prolonged Conflict: Subject positions and meaning constructions in postdivorce families

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    Background: Prolonged conflicts among postdivorce or noncohabiting parents are found to threaten the welfare of children, parents, and functioning in two household families. These family contexts are known in the literature as having intensified psychosocial risk, pressuring subject positions of family members, and having difficulty functioning as a family. Many resources are spent from an array of public institutions—court, health, and child and family welfare institutions—to promote cooperative coparenting, help resolve custody conflicts, and aid the functioning of the family. A need exists for a further understanding of children’s and parents’ positions in prolonged conflict and their views on family life. More knowledge about postdivorce families (in chronic conflicts) is important for policy-makers and various service providers for children and families. Overall aim: This thesis aims to explore the meaning constructions and subject positions of postdivorce families in prolonged conflicts. Social constructionism and the systemic perspective have been a meta-theory in this thesis, combined with a discursive framework and the use of positioning theory. In this thesis, the term postdivorce or separated families involves families with noncohabiting parents, with parents having been married, with others having been cohabiting, and with some having not lived together at all. The main ambition of this study is to expand the knowledge about postdivorce families in prolonged interparental conflicts and how these family circumstances seem to be constructed from children’s and parents’ perspectives. The possible consequences of various positions for the family, the professionals in family services, and society are discussed. Knowledge from the children’s and parents’ perspectives might help us discern how one can support their well‐being in (to them) relevant ways. We also add to the knowledge of how to aid and strengthen families embedded in enduring postdivorce conflicts. Research questions: The following research questions were asked to illuminate the overall aim in three papers. The first paper focused on child subject positions and asked (I) how do children position themselves for challenges in postdivorce family conflicts, and how does family conflict position children? The second paper focused on the parallel storylines and subject positions of conflicted parent couples and asked the following three questions. (II a) What storylines emerge when separated couples in prolonged conflicts talk about their coparenting relationship? (II b) What positions of the self and the other are constructed when talking about the conflicted coparenting relationship? and (II c) What does it mean for the duty of parenthood when separated parents are in prolonged conflict? The third paper focused on fathers’ stories in prolonged conflict and asked the following three questions. (III a) What storylines of parental agency emerge when separated fathers talk about their children who are in distress from the conflict? (III b)What positions of agency do fathers take up in these storylines, and in what kinds of subject positions are fathers other-positioning their children and ex-partner ? (IIIc) How do these storylines legitimize fathers’ own subject positions and actions towards their children and ex-partner? Methods and Data: The ontological and epistemological stance in this research project is from systemic paradigms—that of social construction (Gergen et al., 2015) and bringforthism (Maturana & Varela, 1992; Maturana et al., 1980). The research project uses a qualitative methodology. The empirical material is from in-depth interviews with children and their parents in prolonged-postdivorce families with frameworks from social construction, systemic theory, and the discursive framework of positioning theory. The interviewed families were participants in a family therapy program in Norway that aimed to assist families with parents with a history of more than two years of conflict and who had been unsuccessful in resolving conflict or their coparenting challenges through family mediation, counseling, or legal proceeding/court attendance. Findings: Paper I: Children take up three dominant positions to address family conflict: (1) keeping balance (in the storyline of the family conflict), (2) keeping distance (in the storyline of the troubling parent), and (3) keeping on with life (in the storyline of life—as more than family challenges). Arguably, each position is an act of resistance against threats from family conflict. Paper II: Two typologies of conflicted storylines from an overarching storyline of “The Troublesome Other and I” were prominent in the findings: (1) storylines of violations of trust, positioning the coparents in relation to traumatic events in the past, and (2) storylines of who is bad, positioning the coparent as either a disloyal coparent or a dysfunctional parent. The findings indicate that prolonged conflicts made it impossible to find available positions for cooperation. Paper III: Three positions of father agency emerged in the analyses: (1) The Savior, (2) the Jungle Guide, and (3) a Beacon in a Fog of Uncertainty. Each position exemplifies fathers’ “world views,” “microcosmoses,” or “moral orders” of postdivorce dangers that surround children and shows how fathers typically position their children and their ethical stance in terms of parental agency. Our understanding of fathers’ agency from the perspective of positioning theory is fathers’ storylines (world views) about their obligation to carry through a line of action (perform agency) in response to how they perceive their children and their needs. This could be viewed as an alternative to understanding actions of father`s in high conflict divorce families that are often explained through the lens of psychopathology. Discussion and conclusive reflections: The discussion chapter in this thesis discusses patterns across the individual papers. In addition, some implications for professional practice and methodological strengths and limitations are discussed. The findings highlight how prolonged conflict positions the family system and how different family members typically construct and take up available subject positions to address conflict-related challenges. Such knowledge is relevant for Norwegian family counseling services and all agencies in contact with children and parents of postdivorce families, such as schools and child welfare agencies. It is also relevant internationally for professionals and various forms of behavioral and mental health services that aid children and parents in postdivorce families. This thesis further argues that children with parents in prolonged conflict are not passive victims but agents dealing with conflict challenges. Prolonged postdivorce conflict is found to be a disruptive positioning force and a threat to parents’ agency. This thesis argues that family counseling services should aid postdivorce parents within the boundaries of their joint capacity of cooperation and that parents in prolonged conflict might more successfully practice parallel parenting to reduce conflict exposure. This thesis also states that prolonged postdivorce conflict is a responsibility of society and not of conflicted parents or families alone. Therefore, it is important that welfare institutions, such as family counseling services, apply a nonjudgmental and systemic framework and take into account the different subject positions in the family mean. Furthermore, this thesis also adds to our knowledge of how various subjects’ positions taken up by that family members in families embedded in prolonged conflicts restrain the possibilities of other members from taking up their preferred subject position as a child, as a parent vis-à-vis the child, or in relation to the other parent. This study uses positioning theory to add an interconnected perspective of discourses of postdivorce families and how families negotiate subject positions. In the final reflection, family counseling services are warned against professional diagnostics and the use of terminology that creates a linear and fixed/rigid positioning of family members in prolonged postdivorce conflicts. This thesis has broad relevance for understanding challenges and dilemmas that family counseling services face today, as well as the more specific need for more research that investigates the meaning-making of children and parents as service users and how different welfare services position the postdivorce family with conflict-related challenges.Doktorgradsavhandlin

    Losing Work, Moving On: International Perspectives on Worker Displacement

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    This volume presents a collaborative effort by 22 labor economists who examine worker displacement and the attempts to address it in 10 industrialized countries. Using large nationally-representative data sets and detailed policy analysis, the authors focus on two key questions related to worker displacement: 1) whether the experiences of displaced workers in the Untied States, and the patterns of experiences across workers, echo patterns seen in other developed countries, and 2) what can be learned, both from the similarities and from the differences across countries?https://research.upjohn.org/up_press/1177/thumbnail.jp

    Parental addiction, conflicts and marital disruption: perception of adult children of divorced parents

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    Divorce is a stressful event often combined with spouse conflict which significantly affects the way children experience the consequences of family reorganization. Various factors contribute to the impact of divorce on child development, one of the most decisive being the quality of parental relationship prior to, during and after divorce. The article addresses one main question how spouses’ conflict during the process of divorce is intertwined with a child’s experience.   Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 20 adult children (7 men and 13 women)  from divorced families. Adults ranged in age 21 to 42 years old.  Five to twenty years passed from their parents’ divorce. The results show that in the cases of violent parents’ relationships or family relationships with addiction prior to divorce, the participants experienced relief when the nuclear family dissolved; however, in most cases conflict between parents persisted after divorce, the child being torn between both parents. When the conflict between the parents is combined with various addictions, the consequences for the child are even more devastating. In most cases, children were left to themselves. The findings of this study can therefore contribute to creating various forms of educational, consulting, or therapeutic help

    Effect of Intimate Partner Violence on Children of Puerto Rican Women

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    Intimate partner violence [IPV] is a preventable and costly societal issue that has reached epidemic proportions. Women are often the victims of IPV, and millions of children are exposed to it annually. The purpose of this study was to explore experiences of Puerto Rican mothers and their perceptions of how IPV exposure may have impacted their children using resilience theory. Data were collected via audiotaped individual interviews with 9 Puerto Rican mothers who endured an array of escalating IPV, often exacerbated by the perpetrators use of alcohol or drugs, and had IPV-exposed children aged 6 -11 years. Data analysis integrated content and thematic procedures. Interview data was transcribed, read, audited and coded based on compelling statements, quotes, and sentences made by the participants. The coded clusters were further evaluated, reduced to significant statements, then grouped into themes that captured the essence of the participants lived experiences and of the group. The mothers separated because they feared for their lives and the effect of IPV on the children. Once separated the mothers felt isolated, lived in shelters which were unconducive to childrearing, and had challenges navigating the system. They perceived their IPV-exposed children exhibited a multitude of behaviors including PTSD but that most were showing signs of resilience. Their IPV was perpetrated by males who were mostly the biological fathers of their children who used controlling behaviors towards the kids. The potential positive social change impact of this study is to empower Puerto Rican mothers to disclose IPV and to better inform health care providers regarding the impact of IPV on children aged 6 -11 years in an effort to increase the health, well-being, and resiliency of this vulnerable population

    Law reform for shared-time parenting after separation: reflections from Australia

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    Shared-time parenting is an emerging family form in many Western countries. Legislative reform in Australia in 2006 introduced a presumption of ‘equal shared parental responsibility’ and a requirement that Courts explicitly consider the making of orders which provide for children to spend ‘equal time’ or ‘substantial and significant time’ with each parent. These reforms occurred in the context of an already increasing prevalence of shared time parenting arrangements. In this article, we highlight key changes to family law legislation in Australia over the last four decades which evidence an increasing emphasis on the involvement of both parents in a child’s life after separation. We then turn to demography, identifying some common characteristics of families who adopt shared-time parenting arrangements and exploring the prevalence and incidence of shared-time arrangements. In particular, considering whether prevalence and incidence appear to have been affected by legislative reform. We conclude by offering some reflections for other countries on the Australian experience of legislating to encourage shared parenting in the broadest sense

    Divorce, conflict and mental health: how the quality of intimate relationships is linked to post-divorce well-being

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    Partner relationships, including new relationships after divorce, are found to be beneficial for mental health. However, the impact of their quality remains unclear; this uncertainty applies to past and ongoing relationships between ex-spouses as well. We study the relationship between conflict—in the prior marriage, with the ex-partner, with a new partner—and both positive and negative mental health. Multilevel linear models are carried out on a subsample of 892 divorcees from the dataset “Divorce in Flanders.” Living together with a new partner, either in marriage or cohabitation, seems beneficial for mental health, even in cases of (high) conflict. Nevertheless, conflict places a burden on well-being, especially for women in non-marital relationships. Ongoing conflict with the ex-spouse is also damaging for mental health. In contrast, prior marital conflict does not relate to lower, but to slightly higher, levels of life satisfaction after divorce
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