You feel your marriage is unhappy, and you are considering divorce, although you have children in this marriage. But do you fully understand how divorce will affect your children?
In present times, separation and divorce have become very common for married couples. Divorce brings about incalculable losses to all the family members, the young children are also not exceptional, they can also feel something important misses in their families even before the divorce, and inevitably the children in between will have to confront profound feelings of loneliness and sadness.
Divorce can happen for all kinds of reasons; don’t assume that your children’s psychological endurance is as good as you are, such rapidity of change may overwhelm your children. Maybe, you have prepared to file for divorce, but there are still some thoughts and concerns that remain unresolved in your heart; especially concerns about your children, you may have repeatedly asked yourself “How will my children turn out after divorce?”; no doubt, if you rush to sign the divorce papers, the children will have to feel inadequate due to a separation from a parent and a dramatic change in the way of life. Then it is bound to produce a chain of short term and long term negative effects.
As regards how divorce affects children. If you are struck by your lack of forethought, the content below may give a reference for you.
How divorce affects children in a short term (generally these reactions can typically diminish or disappear as time passes):
(1) Anxiety:
In the emotional aftermath of divorce, the children tend to become anxious, nervous, and tense. Young kids are particularly prone to this; after all, they depend more heavily on partners than old children. It is hard for an anxious child to concentrate on his/her studies, and even he/she may suddenly lose interest in his/her favorite things.
(2) Constant stress and feelings of guilt:
A lot of children whose parents split up falsely consider themselves to be a reason behind the fragmentations of their families, and hence they may assume that they should also take the responsibility. This places immense stress in their young mind, which can create a series of serious repercussions like nightmares and excessive negative thoughts.
Most children whose parents divorced wonder why the divorce happened to their families; they may think about this question alone, even though their parents tell them that they are too young to understand adult matters. Maybe, they wonder whether their parents divorced because their parents no longer loved them, or whether they have ever done something wrong that upset their parents… A lot of children experience feelings of guilt about their parents’ divorce, and it occurs to their parents with surprise that they think about parental divorce in such a strange way, but it is just normal for children; children, especially young children, are not able to look at their parents’ relationship issues in a rational way. And their thoughts are often beyond their parents’ expectations.
(3) Irritability and mood swings:
Probably, young children whose parents divorced will suffer from irritability and mood swings when interacting with other people, even though they are interacting with their intimate friends. And even some of them are likely to enter a withdrawal mode, in which they are in no mood for communicating with anyone. Eventually, they may become withdrawn, moody, and prefer to kill time alone rather than spend time together with someone else.
(4) Acute sadness:
If acute sadness rushes through a child’s heart from time to time, he/she will hardly feel good about his/her life; as a long term manifestation of intense sadness, the child may often plunge into depression.
(5) Distress and disillusion:
Children of divorced parents may often feel disillusioned and hopeless due to the lack of emotional support from parents; especially if a child is taken care of by a single parent who has no access to the other parent, the situation can get worse.
To better understand how divorce affects children in the long term, let’s talk about the common negative effects of divorce on children’s grow-ups:
(1) Poor performance at school:
For a child living with divorced parents, divorce may be a factor leading to his/her diminished school performance and achievement. Compared with children from intact families, children who live with single or cohabiting parents are found to have relatively many behavioral problems at school, such as behaving aggressively towards classmates, disruptive behavior disorder, and being disposed to violence.
(2) Low capacity to deal with conflict:
Divorce can significantly result in children’s decreased capacity to resolve conflict. The difference between intact families and divorced families primarily lies in the couples’ capacity to resolve marital conflict and work toward an agreement. The parental modeling in divorced families significantly reduces children’s capacity to stabilize their future marriages, although those children will also draw experience from the failure of their parents’ relationships and try to expand efforts to maintain their new families. And the example below may make this point clearer:
For instance, compared with students from intact families, those students from divorced families are more inclined to resort to violence to resolve conflict, and they can be relatively aggressive and physical/verbally violent to people around them; in particular, parental divorce during children’s adolescence can contribute to violent partnerships in their adulthood.
For those children of divorced parents, their future marriages are also more likely to be unhealthy, filled with all sorts of relationship crises (e.g. escalated conflict, zero communication, frequent arguments, and an assault on their spouses). Although children who experienced parental divorce hope to have a stable marriage as they grow up, but research found that they easily lose faith in marriage as well as family unit; numerous surveys have proved that people who grow up in divorced families have a much higher propensity to divorce than people who grow up in an intact family of origin.
The marital problems, as well as family problems, can transmit across generations, so to speak.
(3) Delinquency and criminality:
Children in non-intact families are more prone to delinquency than those children in intact families. Usually, in an area where there is a lower divorce rate, there is a lower crime rate as well as a higher rate of informal and formal social controls (especially the supervision of children).
According to research, a child who experiences parental divorce before the age of 10 is more likely to have the unintended consequence of juvenile delinquency as well as adult criminality; moreover, for the majority of children living with single divorced parents, the disruptive behavior is typically manifested when they are getting along with their stepfathers/stepmothers.
Now you have gained an in-depth understanding about how divorce affects children; if you still think you have to divorce with your spouse, you should also try your best to give your children the best care, here are some tips:
(1) Make sure to let your children know that their daddy and mom still keep on loving and looking after them.
(2) Protect your children from adult responsibilities and worries. Let your children clear know that divorce is the responsibility of both parents and that it is none of their business.
(3) Be open to your children. Your children should have the right to know what will happen to them.
(4) Reserve time for your children to stay together. And be reliable about your arrangements to see them.
(5) Respect your children’s opinions, but meanwhile, let them know that parents have their reasons for divorce and that parents can be responsible for their decisions.
(6) Never pull your children into your marital conflict.
(7) Make the needed changes for divorce, but if some unnecessary changes can be avoided, try not to change. The less you change after divorce, the better for children. This helps your children feel that you are still deeply concerned about them and that a lot of parts of life after divorce can be reasonably normal.
The final word:
Children don’t get greatly and negatively affected by the divorce itself. Most of the bad effects of divorce result from the subsequent issues, such as fear about the future, an on-going conflict between parents, and parenting after divorce.
Surely, whether a problematic couple should divorce or not can not be generalized; but in most cases, choosing to stay in a marriage is more conducive to children’s growth than rushing to divorce. By the way, a large number of divorced couples have huge regrets about their decisions to divorce that seemed right at that time.
One piece of advice: generally, when it comes to how to deal with your failing marriage, divorce should be your final decision; before making this decision, you are supposed to do everything you can to save your marriage life, out of the consideration of protecting your children.
For more expert tips on how to save your marriage life and how to protect your children, you might go on to watch the video below; inside it, Brad Browning, a marriage coach with 12+ years of experience, will provide the comprehensive marriage-saving guidance that may help you survive in the unhappy marriage.
Maybe, you are also interested in the related posts below:
Should you divorce your spouse – Top reasons for divorce.
How to stop divorce and save your marriage – 7 marriage saving tips.
6 tips on how to survive in an unhappy marriage without divorce.
What to do when your spouse wants to leave you – Save your marriage.