5. Effects of divorce and day care

More than half of children whose parents divorce lose contact with the non-custodial parent (nearly always the father) within two years. The effects are generally more serious than losing a father through death. As Richards pointed out children of divorced parents usually feel that the parents chose to divorce, in spite of the fact that the children themselves were opposed to it. This cremates feelings of anger and being ignored which are rarely found when the father dies.

There is another important difference between divorce and death of the father. Death usually leads to the relatives on both sides of the family becoming more actively involved in the care of the children. In contrast, divorce often leads to the children losing contact with many of their relatives as well as the absent father.

The different effects of death and divorce can be seen in children's performance at school. On average, divorce reduces the standard of children's school work far more than does a death in the family.

Some of the effects of divorce were studied in detail by Hetherington et al. They looked at 4-year-old children over a two-year period. They called the first year after divorce the crisis phase. During that time, the mothers became stricter than before, and were less affectionate. In return, the children behaved in more aggressive way, and this was especially the case with boys. During this first year, the non-custodial fathers tended to become less strict and often gave treats to their children.

The adjustment phase was usually reached about two years after divorce. There was more routine and order about the children's everyday lives. In addition, the mothers had begun again to treat their children in a more patient and understanding fashion.

Two reasons why some of the effects can be less serious in adolescents than in younger children. First, adolescents are often better able to understand that their parents have divorced because of the poor relationship between them rather than because of anything their children have done. Second, most adolescents have begun to develop close attachments to other adolescents, and so their family is of less central importance in their lives.

Effects of day care

Some of the factors that determine whether day care has negative effects on infants' development are as follows:

• Infants are more likely to suffer in day care if they are between 6 and 12 months of age than if they are older; this is more true of boys than of girls.

• Infants from single-parent families are slightly more likely to experience negative effects than those from two-parent families.

• Day care provided by emotionally caring caregivers who become familiar to the infants, and who have only a small number of infants to look after, is better than day-care provision lacking these features.

Infants do better in day care when their mothers want to go out to work than when their mothers would prefer to stay at home (Hoffman, 1989); thus, it is better for infants when their mothers are satisfied rather than dissatisfied.