r adolescence (Hetherington, 1993; Hetherington & Anderson, 1987; Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992).Coping with family stressors of such a demanding nature, particularly over an extended time period, may easily tax or exceed the cognitive and behavioral resources that areavailable to children (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that the capacity to cope with and adjust to a stressful life circumstance such as divorce may be evenfurther undermined among those children with difficult temperaments or histories of behavioral or emotional problems (Caspi, Elder, & Herbener, 1990; Hetherington, 1991b; Rutter, 1987). To testthis supposition, the role played by preexisting (i.e., predivorce) individual characteristics such as temperament on children's responses to divorce needs to be examined, thus advancing amultiple-risk interaction model of adjustment outcomes in children. This same risk model may also be applied to investigate whether divorce affects the course of psychopathology already presentin children from a developmental trajectory perspective.One of the pathways to later disturbance has been linked to earlier temperament difficulties and/or problematic adjustments in childhood (Cohen & Brook, 1987; Farrington, Loeber, &Van Kammen, 1990; Mannuzza et al., 1991; Olweus, 1980), suggesting a vulnerability for future disorders among already troubled children. For example, it has been found that a childhood diagnosisof attention deficit disorder persisted in 40% of probands at age 18, and increased the risk of antisocial and conduct disorder diagnosis by almost five times. However, while childhood disorderwas clearly a risk for later disturbance, the alternative perspective is that stability of diagnosis was not observed in over half the probands. Further, findings from other studiesinvestigating the persistence of childhood hyperactivity and deficits in attention span and impulse control are more equivoca...
