Divorce and Children

Couples with children often face an agonizing choice when considering whether to divorce. They wonder whether they should stay together for the sake of their kids. Will it be better for their kids to have easy access to both parents, even though those parents are often locked in battle? Parents doing their best to raise emotionally healthy children wonder if divorcing creates an example that will be followed by their children in adulthood. These are serious issues. Researchers provide some general guidance, but warn that the effects of divorce on children are not uniform.

The conventional wisdom on divorce has been that whatever is good for the parents will be good for the children. That is, if divorce results in a happier, more optimistic parent, the child will be better off, even if time with the other parent is reduced. Some initial re-search dealing with the effects of divorce on children supports this position. However, a more recent, larger-scale, longer-term study suggests otherwise. It found that, while the parents’ marital unhappiness has a broad negative impact on virtually every dimension of the children’s well-being, the parents’ divorce has a similar negative impact. Only children in very high-conflict homes were found to benefit from the reduction in conflict that is often associated with divorce. In lower-conflict marriages that end in divorce, which account for approximately two-thirds of divorces, the situation of the children was made much worse following a divorce.

If divorce cannot be seen as an improvement of circumstance for most children in the short term, can these children recover relatively quickly? Again, the most recent research—both in small, qualitative studies and large-scale, long-term studies—indicates that the answer is no. The effects of divorce are long lasting. Even grown children whose parents have remarried since their divorce sometimes wish for their parents to reunite. The children of divorce usually do eventually get past the psychological issues they experience as a result of divorce, but it is not unusual for these children to still be working through these issues into their thirties.

Finally, while it would make sense that children of divorce would be cautious about getting married and, having first-hand knowledge of the pain of divorce, be determined to avoid it, this is not what usually happens. The divorce rate among children of divorce is much higher than that among children raised in intact families. A recent study found that one major reason for this is simply that the children of divorce do not consider marriage to be a lifelong commitment. They never witnessed an example of sustaining a marriage through the difficult periods experienced in almost all families.

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