Growing Up with Divorced Parents: a Phenomenological Study of Preschool Children's Experiences.

Abstract

In 1982 over three million children, under six years of age, lived with divorced parents in the United States. This human science descriptive case study investigates the experiences of six "normal" preschool children in divorced single-parent families from the children's perspective. For a year, experiential data were collected weekly within the children's homes. Informal "interviews" and participant observations were gathered from the children individually and with their parents, siblings, and friends. Observational records were kept of the children's free play, spontaneous drawings, and divorce-related play activities, such as doll play or open-ended stories. All of the children were asked to draw pictures of themselves and of their families. In depth interviews were also conducted with the custodial parents. Interpretation of the data involved two phases; the first generated thematic categories, grounded in the children's experiential data. These categories helped organize descriptions of the children's experiences within their social context, i.e. their homes. The second interpretive phase used these conceptual categories for comparative purposes and for cross validation of findings across families. The results illustrate that the structural differences in divorced single-parent families, as compared to dual parent families, create for preschool children some shared life experiences. (1) Preschool children must cope with parental loss, i.e. their parent's divorce. They create their own meanings this loss in ways that are significantly influenced by how their divorced parents view their marital dissolution and single-parent families. (2) Preschool children's experiences are highly dependent on their custodial parent's lifestyle, and they develop a sensitivity to and underst and ing of their custodial parent's multiple roles and responsibilities. (3) Young children also remain influenced by their non-custodial parents, whether or not they continue to see them. Other findings demonstrate the enormous variation of experiences that preschool children have in divorced single-parent families. This is based on how the children's common life themes are lived out and on how their families function. Preschool children's families function differently depending on their environmental supports and the relationships they foster, including the divorced parents' relationship with each other and the children's relationship with both parents and with others.