Family “Divorce Heritage” and its Intergenerational Transmission

Whatever nonparental influences in society may be fostering divorce or favoring marital permanence, within families the occurrence of divorce tends to raise the probability of divorce among the next generation. Important nuances of this linkage have gone unnoticed. By simulation, this article explores at the societal level the intergenerational consequences of various annual rates of divorce incidence. Compared to a low-rate context, exposing parents to higher annual incidence of divorce would raise the amount of divorcing among offspring couples, but even in the “peak-rate case” the operation of intrafamily divorce heritage would not suffice to make divorce in the offspring generation as abundant as parental generation divorce. Other forces have to be operating. Mixed divorce heritage reduces slightly the number of offspring divorces expected by linear interpolation between a no-divorce heritage and a bilateral divorce heritage. A nonlinear pattern calls attention to a possibly important distinction between divorce heritage and background divorce pressure, evokes the possibility of background permanence pressure, and raises holistic questions about the locations of thresholds and about forces that might push societies (not just persons or families) past them. System-level comparisons and analyses are needed.