All relationships have challenges and issues. Relationships take on a whole different set of complexities when one or both people are divorced parents. This reader is a good example:. I have been dating a divorced woman with a 5-year-old daughter for a year and a half. I love her and her daughter greatly, and it seems they both love me, too.

En español | Ask adult children if they would like their widowed or divorced parent to find a new partner, and most would say, “Of course. I’d love Mom (or Dad) to.

Justin Lange did not grow up with many good examples of a stable, long-lasting partnership. But now, Lange is 37, married, and living in Nashville with his wife and their two children. He attributes his present happiness in part to going against the example his parents set. Read: Do married Millennials cheat on each other? Further, as Wolfinger found after he started studying the subject in the s, people with divorced parents are disproportionately likely to marry other people with divorced parents—and couples in which both partners are children of divorce are more likely to get divorced than couples in which just one person is.

Wolfinger says that researchers have some ideas about why divorce would be heritable. And so you bounce. One other albeit minor factor is genetics. And so they get divorced. Though most studies have focused on divorce, some research has suggested that unmarried co-parents are more likely to break up if their parents also did.

Nielsen says that fathers can help daughters build confidence in themselves, and that this confidence serves them well when selecting their partners. Very little research has been done on these issues as they pertain to lesbian daughters or same-sex parents, but other studies have found that sons are prone to conflict-heavy relationships in their teens when raised by a single mother and children, of course, can have a hard time without a present mother as well. Despite these challenges, the likelihood that children of divorce will go on to get a divorce themselves has diminished greatly over time.