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Recent Blog Posts
The Four Parenting Styles: Which Are You?
In the 1960s, developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind identified three distinct parenting styles: authoritarian, authoritative, and permissive. Later, researchers Maccoby and Martin theorized that the parenting style identified as permissive by Baumrind has two types, indulgent and uninvolved. Identifying and understanding your parenting style can help you co-parent with your former partner and relate to your child more effectively. When the court develops a parenting agreement, it considers the child’s relationship with each parent and each parent’s ability to provide for the child’s needs, which can both be tied to the parent’s parenting style. Keep in mind that very few parents fit neatly into one of the boxes below. Rather, these types are the pillars of a parenting style spectrum, and nearly all parents fall somewhere between two or more of these pillars.
Authoritarian
Authoritarian parents are commonly known as “strict parents.” Rather than discussing why rules and boundaries exist, these parents expect their children to obey without question. Authoritarian parents often have high expectations of their children and generally use punishment as a means to encourage compliance with these expectations and control their children’s behavior.
Grandparents’ Rights in Illinois
Many grandparents and parents are familiar with the term “grandparents’ rights,” but do not fully understand it as a concept. It does not mean that grandparents automatically have the right to spend time with their grandchildren or seek custody of them by the virtue of being grandparents. What it means is that under certain specific circumstances, grandparents have the right to petition the court for visitation with their grandchild. Grandparents’ rights vary from state to state, but they exist in some form in every state. They are an important part of family law, the legal area that governs family relationships.
Circumstances Under Which Grandparents can Sue for Visitation with a Child
In Illinois, grandparents may file petitions for visitation with their grandchildren if an “unreasonable denial of visitation” has occurred. This could be in conjunction with a child’s parents’ divorce, the issuance of a parenting plan, or because there is a reason why the parent through whom the grandparent would access the child cannot facilitate their relationship. This could be because the child’s parent is incarcerated, deceased, legally incompetent, or has been reported as missing to law enforcement. Typically, it is easier for grandparents to be granted visitation rights when one of the child’s parents is unavailable to maintain their relationship with the child.
Does Divorce Affect Boys and Girls Differently?
The short answer is yes, boys and girls generally react to their parents’ divorces in different ways. Like nearly every other question about divorce, though, a more accurate answer is that every case is different, and every child is different, so a parent cannot expect his or her child to react to his or her divorce in a specific way based solely on the child’s gender. Instead, a child’s gender can be used as a guideline to anticipate the way he or she might react to the divorce process and a way to understand why the child feels the way he or she does.
Your Child Is More than His or Her Gender
There are a lot of factors that can play a role in how your child will react to your divorce, such as:
- Your child’s age;
- Your child’s gender;
- The circumstances of the divorce; and
- Your child’s personality.
A study published in the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology found no difference between how adolescent boys and adolescent girls react to their parents’ divorces. This could be because in general, divorce has less of an impact on adolescents than it has on younger children.
Waiving the Right to Spousal Maintenance in Illinois
Under some states’ laws, individuals may waive their right to seek spousal maintenance in their divorces. When an individual or couple chooses to waive this right, they typically include it in their prenuptial agreement. Illinois is not one of these states. In Illinois, spousal maintenance is a right just like child support is a right. However, there are limits to this right. Unless the couple agrees to it, a judge cannot order unallocated spousal maintenance after their divorce. In other words, a judge must include a specific dollar figure in a couple’s spousal maintenance order.
How Is Spousal Maintenance Determined in Illinois?
On January 1, 2015, Illinois’ current spousal maintenance law went into effect. This formula replaced the older way of determining spousal maintenance, which was a set of factors that courts could consider at their discretion to determine an appropriate maintenance amount and period of time over which it would be paid. Now, spousal maintenance is calculated according to a formula that takes both partners’ gross incomes and specific percentages of each to determine an appropriate maintenance amount, not unlike Illinois’ child support formula. The spousal maintenance formula is as follows:
Children's Effect on Marriage
As a parent, there is a lot of pressure on you to keep any “negative” thoughts about parenthood to yourself. But the truth is, raising children is hard. This is backed up by statistics: in any marriage, the couple’s satisfaction in the marriage declines during its first few years. For couples with children, this decline is twice as steep as the decline childless couples face.
This does not mean you should forgo parenthood. What it means is that having children can put an immense pressure on your marriage and if you are not proactive about anticipating child-related conflicts and resolving them in a healthy manner, this pressure can push you to divorce.
Children and Divorce Statistics
There are many different factors that can impact a couple’s likelihood of divorcing. Some of these factors have to do with the couple’s children and their positions on raising children:
- Having daughters increases a couple’s chance of divorcing while having sons reduces it. Unmarried couples who have a son are more likely to marry than unmarried couples who have a daughter, and when a couple has two daughters, their likelihood of divorcing is 43.1 percent versus 36.9 percent if they have two sons;
Why Second Marriages Have Higher Risk of Divorce
Statistically, an individual’s second or subsequent marriage is more likely to end in divorce than his or her first marriage. There are a few reasons for this. Although every marriage and by extension, every divorce, is unique, the same patterns and conflict sources tend to appear in second and later marriages across demographic groups.
It is not impossible to have a lasting second or subsequent marriage, but it does often take more work than a first marriage requires. Below are three common issues that drive remarried couples to divorce.
People Enter Second Marriages with More Baggage
Marriages end for a lot of reasons. A few common reasons include:
- Poor conflict resolution skills;
- Infidelity;
- Poor communication skills;
- Domestic violence;
- Financial conflicts;
- Conflicts about how to raise their children; and
- Different lifestyle expectations.
Does your Job Increase your Risk of Divorce?
Certain jobs and career paths are correlated with a higher rate of divorce than others. These are not necessarily the most physically stressful jobs like construction, nor are they jobs that tend to keep individuals away from home for prolonged periods of time, like the military. Many of the jobs cited as having a high divorce rate are jobs that are mentally exhausting and put employees into positions where they are in close physical contact with others, either clients or colleagues.
There are many factors that increase or decrease a couple’s likelihood of divorcing. Each partner’s career is only one of these factors. The couple’s education and income levels, whether they have children, how old they were when they married, and the income disparity between the partners are also indicators of whether a marriage will end in divorce.
Which Careers have the Highest Divorce Rates?
The following five careers are statistically the top five for divorces:
Strategies that Will Not Save Your Marriage
Few couples head straight for divorce when their marriages become difficult. Instead, many try to work out their difficulties and rebuild their marriages into healthy relationships. Couples have different reasons for wanting to remain married. Some want to raise their children in an intact family, others are uncomfortable with change or worry about the financial burden of a divorce, and many still do love their spouses and do not want to end their marriages.
There are effective and ineffective ways to fix a marriage. Below are a few strategies that many couples think will work, but nearly always backfire and accelerate the end of the relationship.
Moving
Some couples move to new cities and states as a way to save their marriages because they feel it will be a fresh start for their relationship. But in many of these cases, the couple simply brings the issues they had in their old home to their new one, and old patterns rear up again and drive them apart. Moving to a new place can make a marriage stronger, but only when the move is an active, affirmative choice made by both partners. When it is an attempt to move away from old difficulties, those difficulties have a way of finding the couple again.
Steps to Take Before Your Divorce
Once you determine that your marriage is over, you have a lot to do before and after you file for divorce. One important step is to start working with an experienced divorce lawyer to ensure that your rights and interests are protected and promoted through the divorce process.
The other steps you take before you file for divorce can make a big impact on your divorce’s progress and its ultimate outcome. During your initial consultation with a lawyer, talk about what you can do to streamline the divorce process. Every divorce is unique, but most benefit from taking the following actions:
Separate your Finances and Create Preliminary Property Division Plans
Your marital assets and debts will need to be divided between you and your spouse in your divorce. You can let the court handle the division process on its own or you can be proactive and make your own property division choices. This latter route generally enables the couple to retain greater control over how their property is divided.
How Are Marital Debts Divided in a Divorce?
In a divorce, the couple’s marital assets are not the only thing that has to be divided. Their marital debts, too, must be divided according to the doctrine of equitable distribution. Just like marital assets, most debts accrued during a couple’s marriage are considered to be property of both parties. In a divorce, the court consider a variety of factors, such as each partner’s income and contributions to the marriage, to determine an appropriate way to divide these debts.
Examples of Marital Debts
Marital debt can include:
- The outstanding mortgage on the couple’s home;
- Debt owed on joint credit cards;
- Student debt for education pursued during the marriage;
- Medical debt; and
- Outstanding debt on financed vehicles.
Dividing Debt According to Equitable Distribution
Even if a specific debt was accrued primarily for one partner’s benefit, such as medical bills for one spouse’s treatment or student debt for his or her degree, both partners are liable for it during and after their divorce.
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