Chapter 7 discusses the health effects of children who experience the death of a parent or the divorce of their parents. I was surprised by their findings, which stated that losing a parent as a child does not affect longevity while divorce does decrease longevity by an average of five years. Even though the death of a parent is certainly traumatic for children, children from divorced families were more likely to have poor long term health outcomes. Personally, I am not a child from divorced parents, but some of my friends are. My friend’s situations, definitely supported the hypothesis in the book, that divorce is much more damaging in a close-knit family, compared to risky families. In risky families, sometimes divorce was a better option that staying married for the sake of the children, when the family environment was a distressed and unhappy one.
Throughout this whole book, I have thought about the type of participants used in the Terman study, and how that might effect the findings. Dr. Terman’s sample consisted of 1,528 bright and generally healthy children. I understand why Dr. Terman didn’t include chronically ill children in his study, but by using generally bright and healthy children, you cannot generalize these results to everyone. I am curious why he didn’t just use a randomized system of sampling, in order to get a more diverse population. In addition, I don’t recall reading anything about the subject’s race. Even the picture on the front cover of the book shows a picture of what seems to be 12 white children. I am curious to see if there is any diversity within the subjects, and if not, why did Dr. Terman choose to use this population.
I think it would be interesting to test this same experiment on a more diverse population, like you mentioned, or to get more information on the diversity within the Terman children. Also, it would be helpful to find out the age of the children when their parents got divorced to see if this had an impact on their longevity as well.