Who's in My Family? A Longitudinal Study of Drawings of Children of Divorce

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Abstract
This paper reports on a pilot study in which a family perspective is applied to the analysis of family drawings of children of separation and divorce. The Draw A Family Test is administered to school age children in the first year of parental separation and at follow up one year later. Our focus on family composition and the relative size of each parent, reveals that children from mother custody families, with time, increasingly omit their fathers from the drawings, and tend to draw their mothers as larger than their fathers. It appears as if in this way children express their sense of the growing peripherality of their fathers. We also found a relationship between children adding people from outside the nuclear family and omitting their fathers. Finally, an increasing constriction in the drawings of one quarter of our sample at one year follow up, raises for us the question of how well or poorly children of divorce do over time.

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