Mother-to-Daughter Disclosure After Divorce: Are There Costs and Benefits?

To investigate the association between post-divorce mother-to-daughter disclosure regarding sensitive topics and adolescent daughters' adjustment and closeness to mother, we collected data from 62 adolescent girls within the first two years after their mother's divorce. Analyses revealed t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of child and family studies 2002-12, Vol.11 (4), p.469-483
Main Authors: Koerner, Susan Silverberg, Wallace, Sara, Lehman, Stephanie Jacobs, Raymond, Meghan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adjustment
Adolescent girls
Adolescents
Case Studies
Daughters
Divorce
Families & family life
Family relations
Family studies
Mother-Daughter relationships
Mothers
Parent Child Relationship
Parent-child relations
Parental divorce
Personal relationships
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Summary:To investigate the association between post-divorce mother-to-daughter disclosure regarding sensitive topics and adolescent daughters' adjustment and closeness to mother, we collected data from 62 adolescent girls within the first two years after their mother's divorce. Analyses revealed that most mothers in the current sample have disclosed to their daughters to some degree about the five sensitive topic areas studied. In accordance with structural family systems theory, we found that detailed mother-to-daughter disclosures regarding financial concerns, negativity toward ex-husband, job ups-and-downs, and personal concerns were clearly associated with greater daughter psychological distress, but not with greater feelings of mother-daughter closeness, as existing retrospective research would have predicted. Daughters' worrying about their mothers explained (mediated) the link between maternal disclosure and daughter's distress to some extent. We discuss methodological issues as well as the valuable contributions that future, more contextualized research could make to understanding the conditions under which detailed mother-to-adolescent disclosure may be more or less risky.
ISSN:1062-1024
1573-2843
DOI:10.1023/A:1020987509405