The Impact of Divorce on Children. School children can cope with separation better than pre-schoolers

The Impact of Divorce on Children

It has always been assumed that divorce causes severe emotional trauma in children and symptoms of maladjustment are sometimes evident in both parents and children. The research has found that divorce has some profound effects on children and the long term effects show that they suffer psychologically and have social difficulties for years from continued or new stresses linked to the separation and divorce of their parents. The researchers also said that children of divorce are anxious about being able to form lasting relationships themselves as young adults. Divorce has a serious effect on children who get more unhappy, insecure, and bewildered at the start of their parents' separation. Children have some of the same feelings as victims of a natural disaster may experience, such as loss, grief, and vulnerability to forces that they can not control.

Pre-school children are affected more severely in the absence of the father, but these negative effects can be reversed by an emotionally stable mother who gives reinforcement in the appropriate sex-type behavior to the child. Young children may be too immature to integrate the intensity of the stress of parental loss by separation. Egocentric pre-schoolers, who see and understand things only in relation to themselves, assume themselves to be the cause of parental distress and interpret the separation as punishment. While the siblings may be stabilized by the parent, the older children may be apt to experience more stress and conflicts from divorce because of the undiluted aggression of the parent.

School children can cope with separation better than pre-schoolers, even though intense pain, loneliness, and a feeling of deprivation is present, because young children can only think of the departure of one parent which is usually the father. They grieve for his return and fear replacement while the older children think one parent is responsible, become angry with both parents, and show distressing behavior to one parent.  Not only the separation and divorce causes difficulty for school-age children, but also their move to new neighborhoods, schools, and being put in new environments causes a decline in school performance because they are not focused on learning but are always wishing for their parents to reunite. About two-thirds of the children are effected by depression and in some areas are low-achievers.

Children need a stable environment and the parents must establish it for them by frequent, repeated, and solid explanations about "what is going to happen to them," who will and "how will they be cared for," that they will not be abandoned, and some assurance that something new will replace the old, enabling them to get focused on reality. If these essential elements are not met, the children's energies will convert to destabilization efforts rather than to growth and development.

The anxiety of adolescents is increased by their worry about the money available for their future needs and school-age children and adolescents both have a lowered self-esteem, poorer academic performance, and greater depression than their peers in non-divorced families. Divorce causes school-age children and adolescents alike to be different from peers of non-divorced families because their sexual identity is affected, their view of both parents is less than perfect, and they are concerned about their future as a marital partner. Adolescents are highly resentful and find the divorce of their parents very painful, but they are able to comprehend the divorce without blaming themselves in the middle of all the difficult and stressful things that adolescents already go through. Parents should work together to provide loving support and firm limits, even if they are divorced.