Basic Facts About Divorce

Prevalence of Divorce and Factors That Put Marriages At Risk

The United States has one of the highest divorce rates in the world with more than 1 million divorces occurring annually (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1989). Most people get divorced in young adulthood, with the Bureau of Census stating that the peak time for divorce is about seven years into a marriage. Ketcham (1990) explains these types of divorce as arising from the "seven year itch."

In other words, there is a period, after about seven years of marriage, where one of both spouses feel that they need to separate from one another and try something different. However, Uhlenberg, Cooney & Boyd (1990) note that while middle-aged people are less likely to divorce than younger couples, the divorce rate has risen even for this group with about one woman in eight ending up divorced after she reaches the age of forty.

What factors place marriages at risk for divorce? Although there are societal factors that place marriages at risk (e.g. fewer legal obstacles to divorce, less social stigma regarding it, fact that more couples chose to remain childless, etc.), surveys of married co

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ationship of behavioral problems such as substance abuse to adolescent children of divorce was conducted by Doherty and Needle (1991). Specifically, the authors administered self-report measures of psychological adjustment and substance use to 320 female and 306 male adolescents (aged 1117 years) over a five year period. Of the adolescents, 48 had experienced the disruption of their parents' marriage during this time. Data were available for this subset of the sample at an average of 12 months before the separation and 5 months after the divorce. The remaining subjects whose parents remained continuously married served as controls. Analyses revealed that the process of marital disruption seemed to negatively affect adolescents' psychological adjustment and substance use. Also, a gender difference was found in the timing of the effects of divorce, with boys demonstrating ill effects after the divorce but not prior to the separation. On the other hand, girls showed negative reactions prior to the separation but these did not become worse after the divorce. Some authors have suggested that the effects of divorce on children can be sufficiently long-lasting that they produce psychosocial difficul
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