• DOI:10.1111/J.174-1617.1992.TB01270.X
• Corpus ID: 56291630

Psychological and structural factors contributing to the disengagement of noncustodial fathers after divorce.

@article{Kruk2005PsychologicalAS,
  title={Psychological and structural factors contributing to the disengagement of noncustodial fathers after divorce.},
  author={Edward Kruk},
  journal={Family Court Review},
  year={2005},
  volume={30},
  pages={81-101}
}

• Edward Kruk
• Published 15 March 2005
• Psychology
• Family Court Review

The phenomenon of noncustodial fathers’disengagement fmm their children’s lives is critically examined. Based on data obtained from a cross-national (Canada and Scotland) study on the impact of divorce on noncustodial fathers, the argument is developed that these fathers’ disengagement from their children’s lives results from a combination of structural constraints and fatliers’ own psychological response to the threatened or actual loss of their children and the predirjorce father-child relationship. While divorce represents a loss which deprives fathers of an attachment figure and a role or identity, it also constitutes a situation where fathers are judicially and legislatively disadvantaged on the basis of gender. Attachment theory constructs relating to situations of loss and bereavement frame the analysis of fathers’ psychological adaptation to divorce and psychological factors contributing to their disengagement from their children, and analyses of gender are used in an examination of the structural consequences of divorce for noncustodial fathers and structural factors contributing to their disengagement. This study also documents the destructive effect of a purely adversarially based approach to divorce. While noncustodial fathers as a group have been largely underrepresented in research endeavors, virtually absent within the divorce literature is any detailed analysis of disengaged noncustodial fathers, although the disengagement phenomenon itself is well documented and extremely widespread. North American studies have consistently reported a figure of a little over 50% of fathers and children of divorce having no contact with each other in the previous year (Furstenberg, Nord, Peterson, & Zill, 1983). It is known that fathers’ emotional significance to children does not diminish, despite infrequent or lost contact; children’s intense yearning for their absent fathers continues unabated well after divorce (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1976; Wallerstein & Kelly, 1980). What is less known is the nature of disengaged fathers’ adaptation to the absence of their children, although these fathers are often assumed to have been minimally involved with and attached to their children and their disengagement considered to be the end result of a tenuous Author’s Note: The study on which this article is based was funded by the National Welfare Grants Directorate, Health and Welfare Canada.