Teachers’ and School Children’s Stereotypic Perception of “The Child of Divorce”

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate how teachers’ and schoolmates’ judgments of a child’s academic, emotional, and social functioning are influenced by the knowledge that his or her parents are divorced. One hundred four teachers and 120 seventh- and eighth-grade students were shown the same film of a child engaging in a variety of activities. The target child was introduced as either a boy or a girl and as living either with both parents or with a divorced mother. The results showed a more negative evaluation of the child of divorced parents by both teachers and students on all three judgment dimensions. The results also showed meaningful patterns of selective and inferential memory of the facts, which varied according to the subject’s beliefs as to the marital status of the target child’s parents.