The Impact of Divorce on Children - Research Paper Example

The Impact of Divorce on Children Abstract Divorce and its effects on children are common issues that are on the rise in the world today. Divorce affects more than just the married couple. Children often bear the brunt of divorce, which makes divorce a complicated decision for most parents. Understanding the effects divorce has on a child is important to know exactly why a child acts a certain way. A divorce can affect a child psychologically, intellectually, and even behaviorally. Children can suffer physiologically from things like depression, intellectually by having trouble in school and behaviorally by having trouble in social settings. Legally, a divorce is a single event, but from a psychological standpoint, it is a complicated, multilevel issue. Things like identity confusion, depression, and anxiety are all areas of psychological concern this paper will address. I will also address some of the hidden effects of divorce on children. Through this research I will demonstrate the harmful effects divorce has on children. The impacts of divorce on children: Introduction: One of the biggest social issues that have affected a vast majority of people specially in the advanced countries is unsuccessful marriage resulting into divorce. There are multiple reasons to explain why it is so that include but are not limited to lack of tolerance, lack of independence, conflicting personality traits, career being considered more important than marriage, lack of trust and sincerity on the part of either or both of the partners and infertility. In the present age, people have become abnormally materialistic and place less emphasis on social and legal obligations or cultural and religious norms. Breaking a marriage has become more of a trend than a social taboo. The horizon of the ultimate influence of the practice does not remain confined to the separating man and woman but also takes their children into influence who are mentally and psychologically distorted and the psychological wounds may take the span of a life time to fade away. Divorce between the parents affects the children in a number of potential ways some of which are discussed below: Confusion of identity: In a vast majority of cases, children undergo severe mental disorders as a result of the divorce between their parents. When two individuals divorce, they overtly express their regret of being with the wrong person for quite some time. To a child, the tie between his/her mother and father is fundamental to the development of his/her personality in a rational way because the child affiliates his/her identity with the tie between the parents. When the parents themselves break free of that tie, they unknowingly give the child the impression that he/she should not have been born. Not only this, next challenge every such child has to face is to decide which of the two parents he/she would be with from then onwards. This is, indeed the most important decision in a child’s life because this could shape or break his life. While the child wants to be with both of them, he/she is left with no third option but to live with the father or the mother. Some are afraid of putting their identity at risk if they chose to live with the mother. Others can not think of living without their mother. An even worse case is the one in which either of the two parents forcefully keeps the child with him/her as per the favorable legal conditions prevalent while the child may be too small to express his/her disinterest in the ownership. The fundamental roots of the child’s perception of self-identity are questioned and more often then not, children are forced into social exclusion. Children find it hard to socialize openly because somewhere in their mind, they own a fear of being asked about their parents and a matter as sensitive as the parents’ divorce does not sound quite appealing to be revealed to the friends. Gradually, the children build a net around them and do not come out or allow anybody to get inside that net. This hinders their relationships with friends and teachers in the childhood and colleagues and bosses when they are young. Anxiety and depression: Depression is common among the children with a single parent. Nature has devised a way that keeps balance in the family in which parents jointly bring up their children. Such effect lacks in the case of these children and they grow up in a continuous depression. More often than not, parents themselves are responsible for the inculcation of negative feelings in a child’s heart. To earn a child’s sympathy and sincerity, many parents stuff their children’s heart with negative emotions against the ex-partner so that given an opportunity, they would still live with the same parent and hate the second parent. This not only imposes unbearable burden on the little child’s shoulders but the child develops pessimism in his/her approach toward the society and the world. The hidden effects of divorce on children: Some children are over-sensitive and a divorce for them can be disaster. Little children start to blame themselves and feel that there was probably something wrong about them that made mummy and daddy part their ways. The child may doubt that divorce was a way to get rid of the child. Such feelings damage the children’s self-esteem and they may develop a hatred for themselves which causes them to under-estimate themselves on various social grounds and puts them into inferiority complex. Occasionally, there may arise feelings of insecurity. The child feels underrepresented in various school activities and parent-teacher meetings when the child has lost one parent altogether and the other is too busy to make appearance in schools for such purposes. As a result of the divorce, a child has to loose many intimate relations that he/she had developed with the family of his/her gone parent. Responsible and right-minded children tend to serve their parents separately. “Years after parents split, their children may wind up helping to sustain two households instead of one, and those households can be across town or across the country.” (Span, 2009). Many such incidents happening together shatter a child’s personality and the child may be ruined enough to be a criminal as he/she grows up. Signs of criminality start to reflect in the child’s personality from a very early age in the form of undue anger both towards themselves as well as the people they live or socialize with, drug addiction, physical and verbal abuse, pessimistic thinking, guilt, more defensive and less understanding attitude towards parents and teachers, isolation from the society in general and relatives in particular, attempts to commit suicide and premature and abnormal sexual orientation leading to such phenomenon as homosexuality. In her research, Wallerstein discovered that the concept that children are affected the maximum at the time of separation is wrong but instead, the impact of divorce on the children actually shows up when they become adults. “The children from divorced families also had a higher rate of drug and alcohol use during youth, and received far less support for higher education from their fathers.” (Wallerstein cited in Hyun, 2000). Conclusion: Divorce is essentially a break up of the religious, social and cultural tie between two partners but the two of them are not the only one who may be affected. Where the parents are mature enough to control their emotions and get back on the track of everyday life, things are not all too easy for their children that remain as an irremovable mark of the past relationship between the two individuals. Children are not in a position to realize what called their parents to come to the point of separation and are hence, lost into a world of ambiguities, confusion, depression and social exclusion. The negative feelings intensify as the children mature up. “Children’s reactions to parent separation are developmentally related.” (Ashmore and Brodzinsky, 1986, p. 236). One thing parents can do to minimize the building up of negativity in their children is not to curse each other after divorce. Divorced parents should show utmost respect towards each other at least for the sake of their children because children can not and should not be biased towards one parent as per the demands of ethics since they equally belong to both. There is a considerable amount of literature that provides evidence of positive effects on children in favor of this view. (Parker, 2010). “A child’s adjustment to divorce is directly related to the level of conflict between the parents before, during, and after the divorce.” (Oliphant and Steegh, 2007, p. 84). References: Ashmore, R. D. and Brodzinsky, D. (1986). Thinking about the family: views of parents and children. USA: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Print. Hyun, E. (2000, September 8). Research Charts Effects of Divorce. The Daily Californian. Retrieved from http://www.dailycal.org/article/3116/research_charts_effects_of_divorce Oliphant, R. E. and Steegh, N. V. (2007). Family Law: Examples & Explanations. USA: Aspen Publishers. Print. Parker, W. (2010). The Effects of Divorce on Children and How to Cope. About.com: Fatherhood. Retrieved from http://fatherhood.about.com/cs/divorceddads/a/divorcekids_3.htm Span, P. (2009, August 10). Years Later, Divorce Complicates Caregiving. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/10/years-later-divorce-complicates-caregiving/ Read More