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Category: Marriage , Divorce and Break-Ups. There are two main reasons why the break-up of parents can affect kids negatively. There are no easy answers to this. But I have two concluding thoughts. Related Posts. Marriage , Single Life , Research Brief. Marriage , Cohabitation. Divorce and Break-Ups , Fathers , Interview.
Divorce and Break-Ups , Grandparents. Carroll and Lyman Stone. FamilyMeans understands this and approaches a divorce by understanding what the effects are on children of all dispositions. With this in mind, here are some of the most commonly seen effects divorce has on children FamilyMeans can help parents manage:.
Divorce is difficult for all members of the family. For children, trying to understand the changing dynamics of the family may leave them distracted and confused. This interruption in their daily focus can mean one of the effects of divorce on children would be seen in their academic performance.
The more distracted children are, the more likely they are to not be able to focus on their school work. Research has suggested divorce can affect children socially, as well. Children whose family is going through divorce may have a harder time relating to others, and tend to have less social contacts. Sometimes children feel insecure and wonder if their family is the only family that has gotten divorced.
Through divorce, children can be affected by having to learn to adapt to change more often and more frequently. New family dynamics, new house or living situation, schools, friends, and more, may all have an effect. Divorce can bring several types of emotions to the forefront for a family, and the children involved are no different. Feelings of loss, anger, confusion, anxiety, and many others, all may come from this transition. Divorce can leave children feeling overwhelmed and emotionally sensitive.
Children need an outlet for their emotions — someone to talk to, someone who will listen, etc. In some cases, where children feel overwhelmed and do not know how to respond to the affects they feel during divorce, they may become angry or irritable. Their anger may be directed at a wide range of perceived causes. Children processing divorce may display anger at their parents, themselves, their friends, and others.
Olga left Picasso, and my mother left my father, though it was Dad who moved out of the family home. It broke my heart. The legislation meant that, for the first time, couples could divorce without one necessarily having to prove the fault of the other they still needed evidence of adultery, unreasonable behaviour, desertion, or separation for two years — or five years if one party did not consent to the divorce. It liberalised the process, making divorce available to ordinary couples, and giving them the option of a less adversarial legal process.
The legislation transformed society, changed attitudes, emancipated women, and arguably saved many children from the emotional damage of being raised in miserable homes. Divorce is now so common that its impact on children and their emotional wellbeing can sometimes be downplayed.
Yet almost every child of divorce I have spoken to acknowledges that it has shaped the way they see the world. Yet however well you do it, divorce determines who we become as adults.
I set out to meet people whose parents divorced in each decade following the act, to try to understand more about how it has affected their lives. How has it shaped their attitudes to relationships and marriage? And do they wish their parents had done anything differently? Chris Marsh, however, was the only child of divorce in his Church of England school in The s might now be associated with sexual liberation, but at the start of the decade Britain remained a conservative society where divorce was stigmatised and rare.
In , 74, couples divorced in England and Wales. By , the number of divorces had almost doubled, to , Marsh is 57, and when we meet in a cafe near his London home, he tells me that, following a nervous breakdown five years ago, he is now disabled and unable to work.
Marsh was 11 when his parents divorced in His father had left his mother for a BBC researcher. One day he arrived in the school playground and everyone knew. Marsh says the experience has left him with an intense fear of being judged, which has affected his whole life, including the way he dealt with his sexuality.
He is scathing about the way cultural attitudes at the time were shaped by the church. His father contemplated suicide. There was so much unexpressed pain. But there was no counselling in the s, he reminds me; to his father, that would have been weakness.
They never really spoke about the divorce. What, I ask him, would you say to a child whose parents are getting divorced today? These things are most likely when the parents are married — and stay married.
Stevenson is 44 now, and lives in Manchester with her second husband. Stevenson describes her childhood as idyllic; but when her parents separated, she was abruptly taken out of boarding school, and her world shifted.
Stevenson, her brother and their father stayed with relatives and in temporary accommodation her sister remained at school. Her mother, meanwhile, moved in with her new partner and became pregnant shortly afterwards. Stevenson says the divorce affected her approach to relationships. She became pregnant when she was just 18, by a US serviceman, and they married shortly afterwards. When she divorced her first husband, Stevenson was careful not to speak ill of him in front of the children.
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