Marriage and Family Experience Approaches

¶ … Marriage and Family Experience approaches marriage as the one thing that counts in a person's life, making one what one is and providing one with the most loving and intimate experiences, and providing relationships that need to be cherished, honored and supported. In this relationship, says the text, there is no place for jealousy. Friendship, love and commitment are the strong glue that holds a marriage together.

Marriage begins after a courtship that includes the experience of being single and then paring up with someone and sometimes cohabitation before marriage. Following the wedding, the family process begins, which includes family life cycles, decisions on whether to have children and parenthood, if the choice is made to include children. Many issues bear on the success of a marriage, such as economics, child-rearing, the needs and expectations of the partners and their extended families, caregiving, ethnic issues, work issues and conflicts, the "time bind" and outside forces. Sometimes one or both of the partners are abusive.

Divorce and separation are the results of the above, when a married couple can no longer tolerate the pressures. The effects of divorce on children, no matter how terrible the pressures of other issues may have been on the marriage, are quite large. Experts disagree on the consequences of divorce on children in the family. Wallerstein and Hetherington are two of the experts who have studied the long-term impact of divorce on families.

Mavis Hetherington has found that 10% of children from divorced families have, on the average, more problems in school, with behavior and negative self-concepts that would require some type of professional help. The statistics were 74% of the boys and 66% of the girls were in the normal range, while 26% of the boys and 34% of the girls were in the problematic range. Other researchers found the statistics about the same and some even found that 40% of young adults from divorced families actually did better than those from non-divorcing families (Hughes 1).

Judith Wallerstein found that children from divorced families grow up faster than others, "forfeiting their own childhoods," in order to support a single parent emotionally or otherwise. They experienced things, such as sex and drugs, earlier than others, but their adolescence lasted longer because it was hard to break away from their single parent. Divorce affects these children most of all during adulthood. In romantic relationships, fear of abandonment can make them choose people they feel safe with, even though the partner may be abusive. She found that only 40% of those now in their 30s and 40s are married. The rest live in various kinds of relationships from cohabitation to still dating. More than 50% have chosen to not have children "because they believe they know too little about good parenting" (New 1).