Julia M. Lewis

The unexpected legacy of divorce: Report of a 25-year study

This follow-up study of 131 children, who were 3–18 years old when their parents divorced in the early 1970s, marks the culmination of 25 years of research. The use of extensive clinical interviews allowed for exploration in great depth of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as they negotiated childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, and adulthood. At the 25-year follow-up, a comparison group of their peers from the same community was added. Described in rich clinical detail, the findings highlight the unexpected gulf between growing up in intact versus divorced families, and the difficulties children of divorce encounter in achieving love, sexual intimacy, and commitment to marriage and parenthood. These findings have significant implications for new clinical and educational interventions.

Building the Supervisory Alliance with Beginning Therapists

ABSTRACT Outcome studies in psychotherapy research have indicated the importance of the therapeutic alliance independent of the therapeutic orientation. However, because of the multiple demands placed on beginning therapists and their supervisors, the therapeutic relationship is often neglected during supervision, often with problematic results. This article proposes that for beginning therapists, clinical supervisors must take into account the supervisory alliance as a means of helping therapists learn to develop their therapeutic alliances. Using ego-analytic theory as a guide to supervision, the authors underscore how to develop this alliance in an effective manner. Specific suggestions and case examples are given to highlight this trans-theoretical approach.

Disparate parenting and step-parenting with siblings in the post-divorce family: Report from a 10-year longitudinal study

Abstract A longitudinal study of divorced families shows widely discrepant psychological adjustment among siblings along with disparate relationships with parents and stepparents in one half of the families at the 10-year follow-up. These differences in sibling adjustment and parent–child relationships were not evident at the divorce assessment. This instability in many parent–child relationships following divorce and remarriage challenges the view of divorce as an acute time-limited crisis for children and court policy that assumes that parent–child relationships at divorce will remain relatively unchanged over the years that follow. Findings also show the power of remarriage to reshape parenting styles of biological parents.