And they lived happily ever after: marriage concepts of older adolescents

Children of divorced parents are themselves more likely to divorce. The transmission hypothesis has been variously explained by the role model learning, high risk mate selection, increased individual psychopathology and more recently by the explanation of the family's positive sanction of divorce. Conversely, studies without matched controls of adolescents' reaction to parents' separation and their own future marriage indicate that these adolescents are wary of marriage, planning to delay marriage until their late 20's or 30's and highly concerned with partner choice. A study of 18 and 19 year old college students (N = 140) was undertaken to see if the attitudes expressed by those from divorced families are unique to this group or representative of the attitude of the general teenage population towards marriage. The students completed the Tamashiro Marriage Concepts questionnaire and a demographic/social questionnaire. The majority, over 90%, scored on the first two stages of marriage concepts (magical or idealized conventional) consistent with previous findings for this age group. A sub sample of 17 adolescents with divorced parents was compared with 17 matched controls. No significant difference was found in marriage concepts, attitudes or social variables including predicted marital age, dating patterns and sexual experience. Thus older adolescents despite their previous experience tend to be less mature in cognitive style in their attitude to marriage than one would expect at this stage of ego development and, therefore, are at high risk for divorce with early marriage. Further, those adolescents whose background includes the experience of a parental separation and divorce show no difference in their attitude to marriage from their peers.