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Responsable: Beatriz Morgado Camacho
Tipo de Proyecto/Ayuda: Plan Propio de la Univ. de Sevilla
Modalidad: Ayudas - asistencia a congresos internacionales (mod. B)
Referencia: PP2013-1693
Fecha de Inicio: 26-09-2013
Fecha de Finalización: 28-09-2013

Empresa/Organismo financiador/es:

• Universidad de Sevilla

Resumen del proyecto:

Nonresident Father Involvement and Child Self-esteem after Divorce

Morgado, B. & González, M.-M.

Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology

UniversityofSeville-Spain

Following divorce father's involvement in the life of their children can change. It’s known that children consistently do better after divorce when they are able to maintain meaningful relationships with both parents unless the levels of interparental conflicts are high. Therefore, the importance on the children’s well-being of a continuing relationship with the nonresident father after the divorce must be highlighted.

The aims of this work are: to know how is the involvement of the noncustodial father in the lives of their children after divorce and to analyze if the involvement of the noncustodial father has any influence on the self-esteem of their children after divorce.

We studied 96 divorced mother families with children between 6 and 14 years old who live inSeville(in the south ofSpain). Time since divorce was an average of 4 years.

Children were interviewed at school, outside the classroom. They were asked about their own experience about parental divorce. In short, we explored their relationship with their father after the break-up and two measures of the degree of the father's involvement were obtained: frequency of contact and assessment of the quality of the relationship between both.

Child self-esteem was assessed by The Perceived Competence Scale for Children (Harter, 1982).

Mothers were interviewed by phone. They were asked about the nonresident father involvement: frequency and regularity of contacts, overnight, if father participates in decisions and economic support.

Results show heterogeneity in nonresident father involvement and a strong and significant relationship between the quality of the relationship with the father and children’s self-esteem. Specifically, children who consider that they have a good relationship with their father presented significant better self-esteem than those who assessed it as bad.

These results are discussed in the light of their implications for the intervention with families in divorce process.