In several respects the relationships between an adolescent and a given dual-resident parent resembled the relationship an adolescent would have with that parent were he or she in the primary care of that parent. In this sense, dual-resident adolescents appear to spend enough time with each parent to sustain relationships at the level that one could expect from a sole-residence arrangement with each parent. In fact, in some cases, the parent-child relationship was even better for adolescents in dual residence than for adolescents in sole residence. Boys in dual residence had more activities with their mothers than boys in sole-mother residence, and both boys and girls felt less disengaged from the mother’s home when they were in dual residence than when in sole-mother residence. This difference in disengagement may reflect the fact that there are more opportunities to disengage the more total time one spends in a home. The fact that adolescents spent less time with their mothers when in dual residence than when in primary maternal residence, however, did not impair their ability to remain close to their mothers, as already noted. In addition, adolescents in dual residence were slightly less likely to find themselves in a “nurturing” role for their mothers (that is, to worry about their mothers and to feel that mothers needed to be taken care of) than were adolescents in primary mother residence.
Adolescents also had somewhat better relationships with their father when they lived with him only part of the time (in dual residence) than when they lived in his primary care. Girls felt closer to fathers in dual residence than to fathers in sole residence, and identification with their father was slightly higher among dual-resident adolescents (both boys and girls) than among father-resident adolescents. Dual-resident fathers also confided in their adolescents slightly more than did primary-resident fathers.
All of the evidence presented thus far indicates that relationships with each parent individually are at least as good for adolescents in dual residence as they are for adolescents in the primary care of a particular parent. As such, these results discount the hypothesis that adolescent children of divorce are not able to maintain positive relationships with both parents after divorce. In confirmation of this, when we examined residence differences on measures that captured closeness to both parents, or comfort in both homes, dual-resident adolescents were equally happy, if not happier, with their relationships than were adolescents in sole residence
