Reassessing the Nuclear Family : Rise in Divorce Creates New Roles of Extended Kinship

All those kinship diagrams--the ones that make families look like Mendel’s peas--are due for major revamping. Changing living arrangements, spurred primarily by the realities of divorce, are calling for a reassessment of the very notion of family. And, USC professor of social work Constance Ahrons said, the redefined family demands not only a renegotiated life style, but a new code of behavior as well.

Addressing the topic of divorce adjustment at a meeting here not long ago of the American Assn. for Marriage and Family Therapy, Ahrons, also a family therapist with a practice in Santa Monica, challenged the dominance of the concept of the nuclear family, and went so far as to posit the notion of the binuclear family: that is to say, the post-divorce family that spans two households.

“I think,” Ahrons said, “that it is critical that we continue to think of divided families as families.

A Continuing System

“For most people,” she went on, “the divided family is a continuing kinship system.”

And binuclear, Ahrons said, “says nothing about quality. It is a family structure.”

Ahrons’ venture into the sphere of binuclear families came as the result of a five-year study of former spouses and how they have adapted to the realities of divorce. Funded in large part by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the study of 98 pairs of former spouses began in 1979 and was conducted in Dade County, Wis. The subjects were interviewed at intervals of one, three and five years following divorce, Ahrons said, with the primary objective of examining what happens with the relationships of former spouses over time, particularly in terms of children and issues of child-custody.

“What I was interested in,” she said, “was how do they co-parent? What does it take for the non-custodial parent to continue relating to the child?”

And underlying those questions, said Ahrons, was her conviction that “parents are the architects of the family.” Specifically, in terms of divorced, binuclear families, “how the parents cooperate and function together will determine how the children survive.”

Ahrons actually began her research 10 years ago, “at a time when joint custody was just coming into being,” during a sabbatical in San Diego.

“And yet,” she said, “there was very little information about how it works.”

Plagued by a history of divorce research “that has been from a pathological, clinical perspective,” Ahrons said former spouses had been lumped into an all but iron-clad stereotype either of warring people, or people who had no relationship at all.

“In terms of therapists,” she said, “until recently, the major theme was that any continuing relationship was a hanging-on.

A Different Finding

“All the studies up until then,” Ahrons said, “had made the assumption that the former spouse relationship did not continue.”

Or, Ahrons said, existing research talked in terms of single parents, “which I think is a terrible term, because it excludes the non-custodial parent.”

And as a therapist, Ahrons said her study actually affected her own way of thinking. “As I have been doing this research,” she said, “I have been finding my own values changing. I think it is critical that we think of marriage and divorce in terms of parenting.”

Focusing as it did on the parents, Ahrons’ study included no interviews with children of divorced families. But in two major studies that looked at the effects of divorce on children, Ahrons said, “they really point to two major factors: the continuing involvement of both parents, and the existence of a cooperative relationship.”

Carting in her own preconceptions, Ahrons said she embarked on her study assuming that “the former spouse relationship was on a continuum, from very friendly to very angry.” But what she found, on the contrary, was that the former spouses divided themselves into four distinct groups.

Because her five-year data is still too new for thorough assessment, Ahrons made her observations on the basis of three post-divorce years. Of her 98 pairs of parents, she found that 12% were “people who get along together very well, spend a lot of time together, and enjoy each other’s company outside the kids.”

Disdaining some ponderous sociological label, Ahrons dubbed these people “the perfect pals.” In general, she said they tend not to be remarried, and they tend to be joint-custodial parents. “They are that group out there that like each other,” she said. “They do not talk about reconciliation. They divorced for a variety of reasons, and most say they get along better now that they are divorced parents. They are still very involved with each other.”

Not ‘Hanging On’

And unlike those therapists who might consider these people to be “hanging on,” Ahrons said that “I do not see it as a negative relationship at all.”

But however well-adjusted this group might seem, Ahrons said a second group, the “cooperative colleagues,” reported an even more satisfactory relationship. These people, representing 38% of Ahrons’ sample, engaged in “moderate interaction,” and most of that centered around the children, with little focus on the non-parental relationship.

“They work together very well around the issues that concern the kids,” Ahrons said. “When they talk about other issues, it tends to be about familial issues--such as mothers, brothers. They do have conflict, but the conflict is managed well. They are able to separate out the spousal anger from the parental anger.”

Of the divorced people she studied, “these are the most successful,” Ahrons said, meaning that this group had the best overall adjustment, most pleasing personal lives, and best relationship with their children.

About 25% of the pairs that Ahrons studied fell into a group she calls “the angry associates.” Like the “cooperative colleagues,” these people are still co-parenting, and doing so with some degree of success.

“The difference is,” Ahrons said, “when they interact, it tends to be fraught with conflict.”

In this group Ahrons observed also that the fathers tended to be angrier than in other groups she studied.

Ahrons’ final group was the “fiery foes”: those people who most closely fit the standard stereotype of the former spouse. Twenty-four percent of her subjects fell into this group, “the kind of people for whom they make divorce cards,” Ahrons said.

“They try never to interact with each other,” she said. “They do things through the children, and when they interact, it is angry.”

One benefit of Ahrons’ groupings, she said, may come in advising and counseling couples during the divorce process. As she points out, “Divorce means the marriage is being dissolved. Not the relationship. Not the family. Because divorced families continue to relate to one another, there are all sorts of events that bring people back together.” As an illustration, she cites a hypothetical college graduation, an event that might force reunion after a prolonged separation.

The “perfect pals,” Ahrons said, “would plan this together. They might stay at each other’s house. They would sit together, have lunch or a drink together. They might even chip in to buy one gift together.”

Ahrons’ “cooperative colleagues,” she said, “might sit together, but they wouldn’t spend as much time together.”

As for the “angry associates,” they “probably would sit across the stadium from each other,” Ahrons said, and would see the child independently.

“Sadly,” she said of her fiery foes, “it is very likely that one of the parents would not be at the graduation at all. And if they both did come, there would clearly be no interaction at all.”

This graduation scenario example, Ahrons said, might help the divorcing couple to work toward a role model, as in “here is a nice way to do it.”

Having gone through a divorce of her own 19 years ago, Ahrons said she had set forth on her research convinced that “out there in the world there had to be some of these people, people who still got along.”

Studying the relationships of former spouses after the divorce, Ahrons said she has become convinced of the need for a kind of binuclear family etiquette, or, as she called it, “certain rules of behavior.”

Said Ahrons: “We now have to do this with people who are divorcing. They have to be taught how to relate.

“We are talking about teaching them to look into the future. Many of their angers are not going to be resolved, and they are going to have to learn to put them aside and carry on.”

Were she to script such a set of rules herself, Ahrons said she would begin by advising parents to “focus on the children.” Next, she recommends “teaching people how to fight fairly, and not to bring up all the old garbage.” In many cases, she suggests finding an impartial mediator, “somebody who can act as a go-between, rather than expecting the children to do this.”

But mainly, she said, “we are talking about finding better ways to deal with the anger and the conflict.”

Stronger Ties Desired

In interviews that ranged from 1 1/2 hours to five hours, Ahrons said she found over and over that “people wanted more of a relationship (with their former spouse) than they had.” What she heard so often, she said, were cries such as “I lived with him/her for 10 years, and I wonder how he/she is really doing?”

Said Ahrons: “I think it is very interesting that former spouses want a relationship.

“I think of it frequently as extended family,” she said. “All of us have these kinds of relationships where certain issues are just not talkable.” In terms of former spouses, Ahrons said, “over time, they take on the characteristic of a fond cousin, with certain hot spots to be avoided.”

Noting that it is not national, and that its built-in biases were geographic as well as economic, Ahrons calls this study of 54 living situations with maternal custody, 28 joint custody and 16 either split or in the custody of the father a “first step.” In any case, said Ahrons, “it provides some normative data that has not been out there,” and as such, may encourage others to be “less static” in their thinking about divorce.