A Child’s Hidden Struggles: Self-Efficacy and Painful Feelings in the Years following Parental Separation

ABSTRACT

The current study examined the influence of post-separation co-parental conflict on participants’ self-efficacy and current distress, through the Cooperative-Competitive Parental Conflict Model. Participants were a community sample of 77 people who experienced parental separation as a child. Cooperative co-parenting was positively associated with good fathering, good mothering, and negatively associated with blaming father/mother for the separation, loss, and abandonment, and seeing life through the separation. Low self-efficacy, blaming mother, and acceptance of the separation predicted participant’s current distress. The findings highlight the impact of post-separation co-parental conflict on children’s self-efficacy and current distress.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-efficacy
• post separation conflict
• painful feelings of divorce
• children

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge and thank the participants who took part in this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any financial support and no specific grants were provided from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.