Children of all ages experience divorce as a stressful life transition. Adding to that stress is the fact that a fair number are exposed to parental alienating behaviors that, in turn, promote conflicted loyalties as the child is pressured to choose one parent over the other. Research in this area has shown that adaptive coping skills and coping self-efficacy are effective tools in helping children better manage the stress experienced during the divorce transition, resulting in an increased sense of well-being. For adult children of divorce, these experiences are even more salient in that the pressure of parental alienation may take on a different form, particularly that the adult child may be expected to take on the roles of social support and mediator. As divorce rates continue to rise among middle age adults, it is very likely that we will see more adult children struggle with the transition of parental divorce. Hence, the primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between perceived coping self-efficacy and the experience of parental loyalty conflicts among adult children of divorce. Secondarily, this study examined whether differences in coping and loyalty conflicts manifested across different age ranges (i.e., child, adolescent, adult). Results indicated that age at the time of divorce was not a significant predictor of loyalty conflict; however, coping self-efficacy positively and significantly predicted experiences of parental loyalty conflict. No significant gender differences were observed on the predictor or the criterion variables. Implications for interventions and future research are proposed.

Keywords: adult children of divorce, children of divorce, loyalty conflict, coping self-efficacy, parental alienating behavior