1. According to the research presented by Stephanie Coontz, how does divorce affect children, and what factors account for the variation in these effects?
2. According to Furstenberg and Cherlin, what factors affect short-term and long-term adjustment of children to divorce?
3. According to Carr, what three factors are the most important influences on spousal bereavement? How does gender shape the experience of spousal loss?

According to Coontz, divorce affects children because divorce can interfere with effective parenting and deprive children of parental resources. Children from divorced and remarried families are more likely to drop out of school, exhibit emotional distress, get into trouble with the law, an abuse drugs or alcohol than children who grow up with both biological parents. Twice as many children of divorce have problems as children in continuously married families. Such problems in children of divorced parents are not caused by divorce per se but by other factors such as poverty, financial loss, school relocation, or prior history of severe marital conflict. Further single parent families are more likely to have less income, adjustment issues, less individual time with the child, and thus give the child more structural disadvantages, but there is also possible problems when one of the parents is not present in the lives of the children. The article further addresses the issue that faces children within trouble marriages, who have greater such problems.
According to Furstenberg and Cherlin, the factors that affect short-term adjustment problems begins with shock, anxiety, and anger upon learning of the separation, in which they need emotional support and structure through daily routine. However, during divorce, such needs are usually not met in that parents are also depressed, anxious, and overburdened. Children tend to externalize disorders such as aggression, disobedience, and lying and internalize disorders such as depression, anxiety, or withdrawl; this seems to be especially true with boys and behavioral problems. There are also long-term adjustment of children which manifest after the initial trauma of the crisis period. This involves characteristics such as underachievement, self-deprecating, and sometimes angry young men and women.
According to Carr, the three factors that are the most important influences on spousal bereavement are age, cause of death, and release from a marriage that was stifling or unrewarding. Older people have less extreme emotional responses with death than younger people; most older people often die of chronic illnesses, long-term illness, etc which require much care-giving chores; people under troubled marriages have less symptoms of grief than those in loving marriages. Gender shapes the experience of spousal loss, because men and women experience marriage in very different ways, so they also experience the loss of a spouse differently which also includes readjustments to daily life as well as psychological responses. Widows are likely than widowers to experience distress and anxiety about money while men are likely than women to experience sickness, disability, and death after their wives presumably due to the loss of a helpmate, caretaker, and tie with social networks. Also, widows are more receive more practical and emotional support from children than do widowers and widowers are more likely to seek new romantic relationships than widows.