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Abstract
Children's living arrangements have become increasingly diverse and complex in recent decades: a significant proportion of children reside in stepfamilies or in separated one-parent families, even in countries such as Italy, which only recently is undergoing a transition from traditional to less traditional family behaviours. The present study explores whether – given the still relatively traditional family context – adolescents experiencing parental separation/repartnering have substantial lower levels of psychological well-being than those living in more traditional families. Analyses with data from a national representative survey conducted in Italy in 2004–2005 suggest that adolescents living in non-traditional families are not necessarily at higher risks of emotional suffering than others. Only adolescents who live in stepfamilies show a lower level of emotional well-being than those living in two-biological-parent families, and this effect is not mediated by family resources. Thus, the relatively high social and economic costs of divorce associated to a traditional family context do not necessarily imply negative consequences for children's emotional status. This suggests further research to better account for distinctive features of national context.
Funding
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007–2013] under grant agreement no. [320116] for the research project Families and Societies.
Notes
1. Hereafter, we refer to traditional families as those represented by biological parents who are a married couple or by a widowed one-parent family. Non-traditional families are instead one-parent families due to separation or divorce (henceforth, called separated single- or one-parent families) and stepfamilies.
2. Similar effects may occur even in the case of a parents' death.
3. In fact, in some cases, a stressful life event such as parental divorce may actually have beneficial effects on children when divorce provides an escape from a hostile and high-conflict family environment (stress relief hypothesis formally stated by Wheaton Citation1990).
4. This should not apply to widowed single-parent families. When a parent dies, indeed, children tend to develop positive constructions of the deceased parent, helping them to overcome the situation in a positive way (Biblarz and Gottainer Citation2000).
5. A total of 23 cases (0.4% of the adolescents) were removed because adolescents were living in non-parental families. Similarly, three teenage parents were discarded. Another 55 observations living in never-married, single-parent families were also removed, because the small size did not guarantee obtaining clearly reliable results in the analyses.
6. The choice of dichotomising was also due to the fact that, as suggested by , the distribution of the variables is not unimodal. Using other percentiles as a cut-off would identify too selected groups. However, preliminary analyses not reported here for space reasons showed that with other cut-off similar results (with only small variations in parameters' significances) were obtained.
7. Despite the fact that unmarried couples cannot be considered typically traditional family forms, we do not distinguish them from married couples due to their limited sample size. Married biological parents are, indeed, 98.7%, whereas only 1.3% (59 observations) were unmarried.
8. Thus we have detailed information on both the physical and psychological health of parents that is not usually available in large data-sets.
9. In the survey, a question asked whether taking into account the needs of each member of the family, economic resources in the 12 months prior to the interview were: very good, good, poor or insufficient.
10. Physical health of adolescents was measured considering whether physical limitations had consequences on people's lives, and if so, in what ways. Five questions were used to determine (1) how much their health limited them in moderate physical activities; (2) how much their health limited them in climbing flights of stairs; (3) whether they had accomplished less than they would have liked in their regular daily activities as a result of their physical health (during the 4 weeks before the interview); (4) whether they were limited in the kinds of work or other activities (during the 4 weeks before the interview) and (5) how much pain interfered with their normal work (during the 4 weeks before the interview). The answers to these questions were summarised and adequately weighted and grouped leading to a variable with three categories indicating the presence of no, weak, or stronger physical limitations (see in the Appendix). Physical health of adolescents, different from that of parents, was not measured by the PCS index, since this index showed a concentrated distribution among adolescents.
11. Parental age is measured in a similar way to that described in Section 3.3 for parental health.
12. in the Appendix shows the percentage distribution of each covariate for the sample of 5226 adolescents aged 14–17.
13. 6 = [exp( −0.06) −1] × 100.
14. Psychological literature does not handle this topic expressly, although there are some suggestions that more-educated parents may have behaviours (e.g., more highly job involved and thus less time for their children, less direct communication with them) that have negative effects on the psychological status of children. West (Citation1997), in particular, suggested that parents with a higher education may have higher expectations, and thus, place higher pressure on children, meaning more emotional symptoms which often make children unhappy and downhearted (Agliata and Renk Citation2008; Chatterjee and Sinha Citation2013).