The Relationship Between Family-of-Origin and Marital Adjustment for Couples in Brazil

ABSTRACT

The experiences in the family of origin, especially the relationship with the parents during childhood, are normally taken as the basis of relationships to be experienced in adult life. In order to analyze which experiences with the family of origin might be associated with better or worse levels of quality in marital adjustment, a sample of 542 participants resident in Porto Alegre, State of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, all of average socioeconomic level, was investigated. Of the total, 78.5% of the participants were officially married and 21.5% lived in a stable union. The mean time of marital union was 17.58 years. The instruments used were the Family Background Questionnaire (FBQ; Melchert, 1998a, 1998b) and the Golombok Rust Inventory of Marital State (GRIMS; Rust, Bennun, Crowe, & Golombok, 1988). Results show that there is an association between the type of experience that the participants lived in their families of origin and the quality of their marital relationship. However, those childhood and teenage experiences accounted for only 10.8% of the quality of the marital relationship. These findings suggest that there may be a relationship between the legacies that people bring from their families of origin and their later marital adjustment; however, lived experiences and environments also represent opportunities to administer the past and to redefine choices.

KEYWORDS:

• Family of origin
• marital relationship
• childhood experiences
• parent–children relationship