Information on Divorce Effects on Children

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Divorce Effects on Children

Not too many decades ago, couples having significant marital conflict fre-quently saw children as a reason to stay together. Many would postpone divorceand strive to maintain the appearance of normalcy at home until their childrenwere grown and gone. But in the wake of many cultural shifts of the 60s and 70s,children have come to be seen as beneficiaries of divorce and less often as an ob-izacle to it: "The children will be better off if we're not arguing/we're not in a'Eyeless marriage." In other words, "everyone will be better off if we go our sep-arate ways." The advent of no-fault divorce laws, beginning in California in 1969and spreading to 45 states within five years and to all 50 states by 1985, waspe anied by a 34 percent increase in divorce rates between 1970 and 1990.

Pain Inflicted by Divorce4p more than two decades of widespread dissolution of marriages, researchItigests that, in general, children of divorce are not as well off as those who growin intact families. According to the Family Research Council:

• Three out of four teen suicides are committed by adolescents from 16 broken homes.

• Children of divorce are 70 percent more likely to have been expelledfrom school and are twice as likely to drop out of school, compared :=their peers who are in intact families.

• Seven out of ten preteens and teenagers in long-term correctional fadi--ties come from broken homes.
Author Judith Wallerstein reported in Second Chances: Men, Women. alChildren a Decade after Divorce that in a study of sixty families divorced1971 and 1981, ten years after the breakup of their parents the children felt leiprotected, less cared for, less comforted" and still had "vivid, gut-wrench3Amemories of their parents' separation." A comprehensive analysis known a: .oirCalifornia Children of Divorce Study found that more than a third of the .-.-1.-dren studied were dealing with moderate to severe depression five years a_---ketheir parents' divorce. According to Wallerstein, almost all of the adolescentin the study "confronted issues of love, commitment, and marriage with ar,--ety, sometimes with very great concern about betrayal, abandonment, and aubeing loved."3 Recent research also suggests that parental divorce may hanelong-term physical consequences for children. A seventy-year longevity stunreported in the American Journal of Public Health in 1995 indicated that inO-viduals who were younger than twenty-one years of age when their parentsvorced were more likely to have a shorter lifespan than those whose familiesremained intact.

Even when Mons and Dad's relationship has ongoing conflicts, fromchild's perspective the breakup of the family is the end of life as she knows itDepending upon the age and personality of the child, several immediate arealong-term reactions are virtually inevitable, even when the divorce is amicableThese are likely to include fear, insecurity, sadness (in some cases overt depres-sion), anger, and guilt. Younger children are particularly vulnerable to the idathat they were somehow at fault and that "Mommy and Daddy wouldn't hamsplit up if it had been better." Older children and adolescents are often as angreas they are sad; in some cases they act out that anger, especially if the divorcegoing to force them to move or cause some other significant change in thennormal activities.
Divorce has such serious consequences for all concerned, especially childrenthat it should be considered an extreme measure. Sometimes there may be no al.ternative, such as in a marriage that has been severely damaged by repeated ancunrepentant infidelity. A partner cannot be forced to stay in a marriage if hensshe has decided to leave it--no matter how fervently the other partner desire,to seek solutions and prevent divorce.

A commitment to avoid divorce at all cost does not mean that marital part should drift silently through years of discontent without taking appropriate action when needed. In many ways a marriage is like a house—it needs a solidfoundation, ongoing maintenance, intermittent repair, and perhaps major re-modeling. Too many couples look at a marriage that needs a lot of repairs andconclude—often too quickly—that it can't be fixed, that they want to move out,or that they never wanted to live there in the first place. But when one or moredtildren have grown up in this family and see it as the center of their world, theprocess of leaving it is traumatic.

A detailed look at the process of marriage mending is beyond the scope of thisbook, but numerous resources—including books, seminars, support groups, andcouples retreats—are available to help with this task. Most important, a couplewhose marriage is in trouble should enlist the help of a counselor whom they trustand with whom they can work over a period of months or years if necessary. Thisprocess should also include a spiritual inventory. If both husband and wife havecommitted their lives to Christ, each should seek to submit to Him daily and con-sciously place the marriage under His authority. If one or both have not yet estab-lished a personal relationship with Christ, there can be no more crucial time to doso than during major marital reconstruction.

Additional accountability to a pastor, other couples (especially those whohave built solid marriages over some years), or even mature relatives, assum-ig they are not contributing to the problem, may be necessary. In a societythat seeks a quick fix for everything from cars to children, making a commit-ment to an arduous process of restoring a marriage—especially when the pos-ibility of a satisfying finished product seems hopelessly out of reach and may require both a leap of faith and a lot of small steps. But when we consider thedamage that divorce inflicts upon children, this effort should become a cou-ple's first priority. Ending the marriage should be considered only as the verylast resort.

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