The study adopts a systematic perspective to explore the changes in the parent-child relationships of co-resident mothers and daughters in families divorced by their fathers' affairs. The study applied qualitative narrative research approach by inviting three mother-daughter pairs who had experienced divorce because of affair to participate in the study through intentional sampling, collecting textual data through semi-structured in-depth interviews, and collating the data through "category-content" narrative analysis. The results of the study are as follows.
1.The effect of fathers’ affairs and parents' divorce on the parent-child relationship: Fathers’ affairs caused children to have conflicting and entangled feelings on them. Because of parents' divorce and fathers’ distance to children, the bound between children and their fathers become rigid, which is hard to recover. When children learn their fathers’ affairs, the sadness and the feeling of pain for mothers results in an alliance with them. These feelings also raise children's willing to spend more time and energy on their mothers, therefore closer the parent-child relationship between them.
2.The effect of fathers’ affairs and parents' divorce on the mother-daughter parent-child relationship: Because of fathers' betrayal in a marriage, the relationship between daughters and mothers become closer as they support and protect each other. Aside from an increased accompany by daughters, mothers also share feelings about being betrayed and the frustration caused by divorce to the daughters. In this case, children become their mothers’ emotional watchers. Besides, since mothers are busy to maintain household when single-parent families encounter financial difficulties, their daughters are forced to take on parental roles in order to share mothers’ duties. As a strict method is taken by mothers to strive for efficiency and don’t have enough time to accompany their daughters, an alienation and conflicts appeared in their mother-daughter parent-child relationship. The relationship can be gradually fixed as far as the families’ economic status become stable and there is a growth of daughters’ ages.
