Attachment--and loss.

Population-based study からみた神経予後不良因子の検討

The empirical literature on the longer-term adjustment of children of divorce is reviewed from the perspective of (a) the stressors and elevated risks that divorce presents for children and (b) protective factors associated with better adjustment. The resiliency demonstrated by the majority of children is discussed, as are controversies regarding the adjustment of adult children of divorce. A third dimension of children's responses to divorce, that of lingering painful memories, is distinguished from pathology in order to add a useful complement to risk and resilience perspectives. The potential benefits of using an increasingly differentiated body of divorce research to shape the content of interventions, such as divorce education, by designing programs that focus on known risk factors for children and that assist parents to institute more protective behaviors that may enhance children's longer-term adjustment is discussed.

Children's Adjustment Following Divorce: Risk and Resilience Perspectives

"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger": Survivalist self-reliance as resilience and risk among young adults aging out of foster care

The mediation literature of the past decade is organized into six topical areas: the determinants of mediation, mediation per se, approaches employed by mediators, determinants of the mediation app...

Mediation: A Current Review and Theory Development

Despite affecting millions of families around the world, parental alienation has been largely unacknowledged or denied by legal and health professionals as a form of family violence. This complex form of aggression entails a parental figure engaging in the long-term use of a variety of aggressive behaviors to harm the relationship between their child and another parental figure, and/or to hurt the other parental figure directly because of their relationship with their child. Like other forms of family violence, parental alienation has serious and negative consequences for family members, yet victims are often blamed for their experience. In order to be recognized as a form of family violence and to secure protection for victims under law and social policies, a formal review and comparison of parental alienating behaviors and outcomes to child abuse and intimate partner violence has been sorely needed. The result of this review highlights how the societal denial of parental alienation has been like the historical social and political denial or other forms of abuse in many parts of the world (e.g., child abuse a century ago). Reframing parental alienating behaviors as a form of family violence also serves as a desperate call to action for social scientists to focus more theoretical and empirical attention to this topic. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Parental alienating behaviors: An unacknowledged form of family violence.

The dramatic increase in divorce rates during the past 25 years has shifted social work research and clinical practice to a newly emerged population considered to be at risk: parents and children affected by marital divorce. The rapidly expanding divorce literature, an array of social services organizations, and legal and policymaking bodies have clearly identified divorce as a major social phenomenon and family transition during divorce as an important mental health issue. At the same time men's issues, and particularly the father-child relationship, have become a source of considerable public discussion and have received high priority for methodological inquiry. An emergent trend of fatherhood has been identified and androgynous fathering promoted, generating much speculation and controversy in the literature. Despite varying levels of child care involvement among fathers, who are far from a homogeneous group in this regard, fathers' emotional investment in their children prevails over other aspects of their lives, and fathers' attachment bonds with their children can no longer be regarded as secondary. Thus, in social work, the importance of engaging fathers in the therapeutic endeavor is a priority. Although divorce and fatherhood research is now flourishing, divorced fathers remain a largely neglected population in the professional literature. Similarly, despite the emergence of therapeutic practice models based on the involvement of all family system members in the therapeutic endeavor, social work practice with divorced families largely continues to exclude fathers. The contribution that social workers can make to families in transition and to the adjustment of family members to the consequences of divorce is considerable. Family mediation and divorce counseling are emerging as important fields of practice for the profession. With the paucity of empirically grounded and systematic information about this one member of the postdivorce family system, particularly in light of data stressing the importance of ongoing meaningful relationships between both parents and their children for the postdivorce adjustment of all family members (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1985; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980), social work practitioners remain limited in regard to engaging fathers in their work with divorced family systems. This article reports the results of a research study of the impact of divorce on noncustodial fathers and the phenomenon of noncustodial fathers' disengagement from their children's lives, discusses the implications of the study for social work practice with families in transition, and begins to develop an alternative conceptualization to prevailing stereotypes of divorced fatherhood. The goal of the research was to identify and integrate the missing elements in the divorce literature and to contribute to an empirically based understanding of divorced fatherhood. It is hoped that this in turn will lead to more informed practice with divorced and divorcing populations. The study gathered data directly from fathers, with a primary emphasis on their perception of changes in their relationships with their children before, during, and after divorce. The point of final parental separation was considered to be the salient event in the divorce process. As Wallerstein and Kelly (1980) found, although the legal divorce ratifies child custody and access arrangements, the transition period from the point of separation to about six months to one year afterward is most critical in establishing and consolidating postdivorce patterns and relationships among family members. Thus, "divorce" here refers to the final parental separation, not the legal divorce decree, and the transition period six months to one year after. The term "divorced father" also requires clarification. In light of the heterogeneity of patterns of fatherhood existing within two-parent families, divorced fathers should not be assumed to constitute a homogeneous group. …

The Disengaged Noncustodial Father: Implications for Social Work Practice with the Divorced Family

This article compares factors affecting the choice(s) to become social workers made by students on two qualifying social work programmes in Canada and the UK. Quantitative data from an ongoing international research project provide an overview of students' choices in relation to their gender, age and ethnicity, while qualitative data from the same project illuminate the complexity of the decision making process. Our findings challenge some commonplace assumptions about the social work profession and the motivations and dilemmas that social work students encounter prior to and during their training. The implications for social work educating and training are potentially far-reaching.

Choosing to become a social worker: motives, incentives, concerns and disincentives

Through a systematic analysis of the link between pre- and post-divorce father-child relationships, this paper examines the issue of non-custodial fathers' loss of contact with their children and families after divorce. A cross-national survey of 80 non-custodial fathers revealed a striking discontinuity between father-child relationships before and after divorce, with those fathers most involved with and attached to their children during the marriage being most likely to lose contact after divorce, and those relatively less involved and attached more likely to remain in contact. Where the pre-divorce father-child relationship was intense, the consequences of divorce and fathers' adaptation to these consequences are likely to be highly problematic. The case is made that non-custodial fathers' disengagement from their children's lives after divorce results from a combination of structural constraints and fathers' own psychological response to the absence of their children and loss of the pre-divorce father...

Discontinuity Between Pre- and Post-Divorce Father-Child Relationships

The phenomenon of noncustodial fathers’disengagement fmm their children’s lives is critically examined. Based on data obtained from a cross-national (Canada and Scotland) study on the impact of divorce on noncustodial fathers, the argument is developed that these fathers’ disengagement from their children’s lives results from a combination of structural constraints and fatliers’ own psychological response to the threatened or actual loss of their children and the predirjorce father-child relationship. While divorce represents a loss which deprives fathers of an attachment figure and a role or identity, it also constitutes a situation where fathers are judicially and legislatively disadvantaged on the basis of gender. Attachment theory constructs relating to situations of loss and bereavement frame the analysis of fathers’ psychological adaptation to divorce and psychological factors contributing to their disengagement from their children, and analyses of gender are used in an examination of the structural consequences of divorce for noncustodial fathers and structural factors contributing to their disengagement. This study also documents the destructive effect of a purely adversarially based approach to divorce. While noncustodial fathers as a group have been largely underrepresented in research endeavors, virtually absent within the divorce literature is any detailed analysis of disengaged noncustodial fathers, although the disengagement phenomenon itself is well documented and extremely widespread. North American studies have consistently reported a figure of a little over 50% of fathers and children of divorce having no contact with each other in the previous year (Furstenberg, Nord, Peterson, & Zill, 1983). It is known that fathers’ emotional significance to children does not diminish, despite infrequent or lost contact; children’s intense yearning for their absent fathers continues unabated well after divorce (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1976; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980). What is less known is the nature of disengaged fathers’ adaptation to the absence of their children, although these fathers are often assumed to have been minimally involved with and attached to their children and their disengagement considered to be the end result of a tenuous Author’s Note: The study on which this article is based was funded by the National Welfare Grants Directorate, Health and Welfare Canada.

Edward Kruk

Papers

Parental alienating behaviors: An unacknowledged form of family violence.

The Disengaged Noncustodial Father: Implications for Social Work Practice with the Divorced Family

Choosing to become a social worker: motives, incentives, concerns and disincentives

Discontinuity Between Pre- and Post-Divorce Father-Child Relationships

Psychological and structural factors contributing to the disengagement of noncustodial fathers after divorce.