CHILDREN CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE - A BRIEF EDUCATIONAL INTERVENTION FOR DIVORCED PARENTS

Children from divorced homes are caught in the middle of parental conf lict significantly more often and are experiencing more resulting stre ss than children from intact homes. Our intention was to use a brief e ducational intervention to reduce the number of times divorced parents put their children in the middle. Participants were 45 high school st udents with divorced parents (male = 22, female = 23; Mage = 15.8). Th ese subjects rated the frequency and stressfulness of 32 such situatio ns. The parents of the intervention group were mailed the subjects' av eraged responses on the 32 items and an explanatory letter. The same 3 2-item questionnaire was given about 1 month after the mailing as the intervention evaluation. Subjects in the intervention group improved m ore than the two control groups combined, F(1,42) = 3.45, p < .10. The se results imply that having divorced parents read some brief informat ion is sufficient to produce behavior changes in the majority of those parents.