18. William V. Fabricius, 2011; The Bad News about Divorce and Children Is Worse than We Thought, but the Good News Is Better than We Thought

CLICK HERE FOR RESEARCH: William Fabricius, Department of Psychology Arizona State University, says:

"the effect of divorce on the father child relationship depends heavily on the amount of parenting time the child has with the father. At equal parenting time, the quality of the relationship was at its highest; at the lowest levels of parenting time with father (0% to 15%) the quality of the relationship was at its worst. The bad news is that a large percentage – almost 40% -- of the students had these minimal levels of parenting time with their fathers when they were growing up, and had damaged relationships with their fathers as young adults.

..... dysfunctional (damaged) family relationships “lead to consequent accumulating risk for mental health disorders, major chronic diseases, and early mortality” (for the child). 

"..........we can see that the bad news looks worse than we thought it was."

"the social processes of parent conflict and poor parent-child relationships cause constant stress in the home which chronically activates and thereby dysregulates children’s biological stress responses, leading to deterioration of cardiovascular system functioning and hypertension (e.g., Ewart, 1991) and coronary heart disease (e.g., Woodall & Matthews, 1989), and possibly hindering children’s acquisition of emotional competence and self-regulatory skills."

Superficial research suggests that father-child contact 'should not happen in "conflicted" families.' The above findings of this research suggest that although parental conflict damages children, to terminate contact to safe fathers massively compounds the damage. It is NOT shared parenting that damages children, but conflict. More emphasis needs to focus on programs to reduce conflict, as opposed to laws and processes which estrange fathers.