In recent decades, considerable information has been gathered on the negative implications of divorce for children’s well-being. However, the implications of divorce on the children’s quality of life – which is manifested mostly in positive life aspects – have been little studied. This article addresses this gap by examining risk and resilience factors related to self-reported quality of life of children of divorced parents, with particular emphasis on psychological processes: self-blame for the divorce and parental conflict and active coping with it. An online survey for one child and one parent was conducted with 122 children aged 7–۱۷ from 86 Israeli families. The data were analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling with mixed models that accounted for the interdependency of the children’s data within each family. All the risk and resilience factors were examined from the children’s perspective, except parental conflict that was examined also from the parent’s perspective. The findings showed that parental conflict (from both the children and parents’ perspective), perceived gap in conflict intensity between marriage and divorce (from the parents’ perspective) and high self-blame were negatively associated with the children’s evaluations of their quality of life, whereas active coping was positively associated with it. The study also supported three significant models in which psychological processes moderated the linkage between parental conflict and the children’s quality-of-life evaluations. The findings are discussed with relation to the literature on the impact of divorce on children’s well-being and quality of life, and implications for social policy are suggested.

Introduction

In recent decades, together with high divorce rates in Western society, considerable information has been gathered on the negative implications of divorce for the well-being of children, and on the main factors affecting it (see Amato, 2010, 2014). Most of the studies on the difficulties and psychopathologies experienced by children of divorced parents assumed that well-being was achieved given the lack of negative life aspects, as opposed to the quality-of-life approach that became increasingly dominant since the 1990s, according to which well-being is manifested mostly in the presence of positive life aspects (Cummins, 1995, 1998). Usually, studies in this area examined children’s well-being as reported by adults (parents, teachers, or clinicians), or examined them using tools designed by adults, such as tools for measuring externalizing and internalizing problems (Amorós, Samper, Martínez, & Sánchez, 2017; Pálmarsdóttir, 2015). It may be argued, therefore, that these studies have in fact examined adult perceptions and views about children’s well-being (Ben-Arieh, 2008). Conversely, according to the recognition approach, a person’s quality of life can be measured only according to the way he or she perceives and evaluates it. Therefore, we can only learn about children’s well-being and quality of life from their own experiences and views (Fattore, Mason, & Watson, 2007). The present study examined how children of divorced parents evaluate their quality of life from their own, subjective perspective.