¶ … Divorce on the Lives of Children
In today's society, half of all marriages end in divorce. Many of those marriages involve children. Parents who are involved in a divorce are often concerned about the effect of the divorce on their children. During the time of a divorce the parents may be preoccupied with their problems but still hold their roles as the most important people in their children's lives.
While a divorce may be devastating or relieving to a couple, children are frightened and confused by the terrible threat to their security. However, if a child feels secure and loved throughout the divorce, he or she may not be harmed by the divorce at all. Reflecting on these concerns, this paper aims to determine the effects of divorce on the lives of children.
Between the years 1950 to 1983, divorce broke up more families than parental death did in the earlier years of the century (Newberger, 1986). "As death rates have decreased through this century, a gradually increasing divorce rate maintained a fairly constant rate of marital dissolution.
Beginning in 1960, however, the divorce rate increased markedly, exceeding the declining rate of widowhood" while accelerating the net rate of marital disruption (Newberger, 1986)." The annual number of divorces in America has increased over the past several years, affecting millions of children across the country.
The large number of children whose parents have divorced has generated concerns over the effects of divorce on these children's lives. Over the past several years, researchers representing diverse conceptual frameworks and methodological approaches have investigated the effects of divorce on children.
In general, these studies have concluded that children from divorced families experience lower levels of well-being across a variety of educational, psychological and social domains than do children from non-divorced families. However, there are some suggestions in the literature that divorce causes no appreciable effect and might even result in positive benefits for children.
I am interested in studying the effect of divorce on the lives of children in populations across the United States. This research is important because. My study is important because it offers a major contribution to the psychological literature on this topic. In order to understand how divorce affects children, it is necessary to look at how divorce changes the total configuration of resources and stressors in children's lives. My paper aims to accomplish this while determining how divorce affects the lives of children.
Divorce can be a very distressing experience, both for the couple in conflict and the children caught in the middle. The following literature review provides a solid background on the topic of divorce and how it affects the live of children. Based on existing studies, this paper hypothesizes that there is a negative relationship between divorce and the lives of children who experience it.
Alternately, this paper hypothesizes that a positive relationship may exist between divorce and children if the parents strongly support the children and deal with the divorce responsibly (i.e do not drag the children in the middle or make them deal with the parental problems).
Literature Review
According to existing studies, many children experience a great deal of difficulty when dealing with the divorce of their parents. These difficulties are triggered by many factors. According to Paul Amato (1993), there are several major hypotheses regarding the causes of children's difficulties. These are:
1. Parental Loss - Divorce often results in the loss of a parent for the children and with this loss children also lose the knowledge, skills and resources (emotional, financial, and more) of that parent.
2. Economic Loss - A major result of divorce is that children living in single parent families are less likely to have as many economic resources as children living in intact families.
3. More Stress - divorce often results in many changes in children's living situations. Many children have to change schools, neighborhood and more as a result of their parents' divorce. Children must also have to make adjustments to changes in relationships with friends and extended family members. These changes often create more stressful environment for children.
4. Poor Parental Adjustment - How children fare in families is due in part to the mental health of the parents. Children in divorced families often have to deal with the emotional distress of their parents caused by the divorce, which disrupts the psychological development of children.
5. Lack of Parental Competence - The majority of what happens to children in general is related to how effectively their parents help them develop. The competence of parents following divorce has an enormous impact on how the children cope with the divorce.
6. Exposure to Interparental Conflict - Conflict...
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