The evolution of the Schr{o}dinger-cat states in a dissipative parametric amplifier is examined. The main tool in the analysis is the normally ordered characteristic function. Squeezing, photon-number distribution and reduced factorial moments are di
scussed for the single- and compound-mode cases. Also the single-mode Wigner function is demonstrated. In addition to the decoherence resulting from the interaction with the environment (damped case) there are two sources which can cause such decoherence in the system even if it is completely isolated: these are the decay of the pump and the relative phases of the initial cat states. Furthermore, for the damped case there are two regimes, which are underdamped and overdamped. In the first (second) regime the signal mode or the idler mode collapses to a statistical mixture (thermal field).
