Two Places to Call Home: (Co)Parenting and Adolescents' Sense of Belonging After Divorce

Abstract

Where do I belong? It is a question that is relevant to everyone, but especially for youth growing up with divorced parents. Experiencing a sense of belonging, “feeling at home”, is a fundamental human need with important implications for the development and functioning of youth. For children, the family is typically the first and primary context to which they experience belongingness. Also during adolescence, when non-familial social contexts become more important, the family ideally remains the secure base from which they can develop themselves. A parental divorce makes experiencing family belongingness considerably more complex, as it involves drastic changes with regard to their living situation, their contact with parents, and the relationship between parents. Moreover, an increasing number of youth nowadays lives a substantial amount of time with each of their parents, which means they have two places to call home. To increase our understanding of how families reorganize after a divorce and how adolescents function within these families, this dissertation focused on adolescents’ sense of belonging after divorce. To this end, the two aims of this dissertation were (1) To examine associations between adolescents’ sense of post-divorce belonging to various social contexts on the one hand and their adjustment on the other, and (2) To examine family dynamics that may play a facilitating role in adolescents’ sense of family belonging, including coparenting and parenting behaviors of fathers and mothers, and aspects related to care and contact arrangements after divorce.