ITHACA, N.Y. -- The effects of childhood family disruptions -- such as parental divorce, long-term separation from biological parents, parental abandonment and foster care -- can reverberate into later life, says a Cornell University sociologist. Women, in particular, who experienced childhood family turmoil are more likely to report interpersonal conflict in later life than are other women or men.
In a study on social support networks and family conflicts in adulthood, Elaine Wethington, associate professor of human development and sociology at Cornell, found that men and women who reported a strong social network were more likely to report good physical health, feelings of cheerfulness and satisfaction most of the time, with no, or very few, periods of depression. And marriage is linked to more positive effects for both men and women.
On the other hand, recently divorced men were more likely to report poor health than were married men, while recently divorced women who felt they had no close friends were more likely to report negative feelings than were other women.
But Wethington found that a person's perception of a strong social support network surpassed even marriage in having positive effects on health and mental health.
In her study, Wethington controlled for education, income, age, marital status and for the number of biological offspring and stepchildren. She most recently presented her findings at the American Sociological Association annual meeting in Anaheim, Calif., in August 2001.
For her research, Wethington developed easy-to-use but sensitive assessment tools that can measure a person's social connections and support network through life. These tools allow researchers to conduct telephone interviews and then assess how a person's sense of social support is related to physical and mental health and whether, and to what extent, childhood family disruptions are related to a person's sense of social support and interpersonal conflict later in life. The tools are useful not only to researchers but to practitioners who can use them to identify a person's risk of social isolation. Wethington collected and analyzed data from telephone interviews with 481 adults, ages 25 to 80 (average age 49).
Wethington's team also replicated the research on the impact of childhood disruptions in later life by analyzing data from 3,032 men and women, average age 47, who were interviewed in 1995 as part of the MacArthur National Study of Midlife. In this analysis, Wethington distinguished among different types of family disruption, including parental death, divorce, having parents who never were married, long-term separation from biological parents, parental abandonment and foster care.
"In general, we found that parental death had less of an effect in later life than parental divorce, long-term separation from parents, parental abandonment and foster care. These family disruptions are much more strongly related to feelings of fewer social supports and more negative moods and feelings in adulthood than parental death is," says Wethington. These correlations persist even while controlling for personality and family adversity -- such as parental illness, unemployment and economic distress during childhood.
Specifically, Wethington found that men who had a parent die in childhood tended to report less social support later in life than men whose parents survived (although, on average, married men reported more social support than unmarried or cohabiting men). Both men and women who had divorced parents, as well as other kinds of family disruptions during childhood, also reported less social support as adults.
In looking at how childhood family disruptions relate to current perceived family conflict, Wethington found that having parents divorce in childhood is related to more family conflict for both men and women later in life, regardless of current marital or parenting status. Married women with and without children, however, reported less conflict than unmarried women.
"Our findings suggest that family history matters for perceptions of social support and conflict in adulthood," says Wethington. "These findings indicate that childhood family disruptions could have long-lasting effects on the quality and formation of interpersonal relationships critical to well-being far into adulthood. Also, the research indicates that measuring and accounting for subsequent events in childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood that came about because of family disruption is a useful area for future research."
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Information on Elaine Wethington
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