Challenging the 'Model Family': Effects of Separation

According to the Merriam Webster Dictionary, family refers to “a group of individuals living under one roof and usually under one head.” Family can be seen as the most important aspect in life and what mostly everyone values the most. Furthermore it can be considered as a universal institution which includes people that are related by blood and emotionally. Within society, there exists the idea of a “Model Family.” First of all, this model includes married parents with kids. However, the dissolution of a marriage challenges the socially approved idea of a “Model Family.” As a consequence, the family moves to being a single parent structure, since there is only one living with the kids. The separation of a couple is the result of a process whose crisis starts with

Amato, professor at The Pennsylvania State University, uses a divorce stress adjustment perspective to summarize the consequences of divorce on children and on adults. His research consists of five questions that help him guide his research to draw conclusions. Although Lansdale et al. argue that divorce has only negative effects on children, Amato shifts the research and puts it on a balance scale when he mentions some benefits of divorce on children. Amato allows the reader to see divorce from another perspective just as it can be evident in some cases that the effects of divorce can exist in some children even though they didn’t haven’t lived through the process of divorce itself (Block, Block, and Gjerde, 1986; Cherlin et al., (1991). For his research, Amato studied the effects on children in two different scenarios, which allowed the reader to gain perspective on the both positive and negative aspects of divorce. He mentions that demographers estimated that about half of the first marriages initiated in recent years will be voluntarily dissolved. Amato explains that this is due to the increasing economic independence of women and the greater social acceptance of