Best Way to Help Your Children Deal with Divorce

Every married couple argues from time to time; that’s part of normal married life. With some couples, the endless arguments are a symptom of much deeper relationship difficulties. For these partners, the outcome may be separation or divorce. Many children will spend some time living in the home of a single parent.

This increasingly common breakdown of family life hap­pens for a number of reasons:

• Female independence. Women as a social group are at their highest-ever level of independence. Many women are able to take on the role of provider, following separation or divorce, because they have a career.

• Female identity. Many women realize that they have skills and talents of their own, that they are not simply adjuncts to their husbands. This increase in self-confidence and self-awareness means that a woman will not necessarily be pre­pared to sacrifice herself to years of unhappy marriage.
• Male ego. Some men feel threatened by the change in a woman’s position within the family and within society, and are unable to accept what they regard as an imbalance in their relationship; this eventually leads to the collapse of their marriage.
• Social tolerance. Being a single parent has less social stigma attached to it than, say, twenty years ago.

Members of older generations often yearn for the days when “marriages were for life.” This philosophy fails to acknowledge that many marriages that were superficially happy in the “good old days” were actually miserable. Staying together in such cir­cumstances may have looked good to outsiders, but those inside the marriage—including the children—suffered emotionally.

There is no psychological justification for the advice that a couple should continue with their unhappy marriage solely for me sake of their children. Some parents claim that, although they have no love for each other, their children are unaware of the true feelings existing between them. They believe that since they have not openly flaunted their disagreements at home, their animosity is concealed. But long silences at mealtimes, an absence of loving response between them, and a subdued fami­ly atmosphere all tell a child that something is wrong.

Parents who desperately love their children, and who don’t want to separate because of this, may find this gives them enough motivation to change their marital relationship so that their part­nership can continue in a revitalized way. This is totally different from staying together in a stagnant relationship for the sake of the children because it involves positive change. It is a forward step.

Social attitudes toward divorce fluctuate from decade to decade. Children will always be at risk psychologically when their parents separate:

• A child needs stable family relationships. Failure to form at least one firm emotional connection with an adult by the age of three or four can have long-term detrimental effects on personality development. Parents have difficulty giving their children essential love and attention when they strug­gle to manage life.
• A child models her behavior on her parents. In a family beset with hostilities between the mother and father, a child is presented with a disturbed model of behavior that she is likely to imitate.
• Parents who fight constantly are likely to use their children as a way to retaliate against their partner. One parent may deliber­ately exercise different levels of control to aggravate the other parent. Using a child in this way will only upset the child even further.
• Every child wants to have both parents and will do her best to remain loyal to both. The end of a marriage does not mean the end of a child’s love for either of her parents. The child does not want to have to choose one over the other, or to form a negative opinion about either parent.

Evidence from psychological research reinforces the posi­tive value of a child maintaining contact with both parents fol­lowing separation or divorce. One study of divorced families found that five years after the divorce about a third of the chil­dren managed well and had no emotional difficulties, about a third managed reasonably well, and the remainder showed signs of emotional difficulties. The main difference between the copers and the other two groups was that the copers saw both parents regularly. The children with emotional difficulties tend­ed to be those who seldom, if ever, saw one of their parents.

The high incidence of divorce in recent years has allowed psychologists to look closely at its long-term psychological effects. Encouragingly, research confirms that children from disrupted families are no more likely to be delinquents than other children, nor are they more likely to have educational problems or social difficulties.

Most of the bad psychological effects of divorce seem to lessen once the family rebuilds itself and adjusts to the new cir­cumstances. The responsibility for carrying the family through the crisis rests with the adults, not with the children. Any emotional damage that results from parental separation will not be permanent if the adults act in a sensitive and reasonable way.

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