Children Respond When Their Parents

¶ … Children Respond When Their Parents Divorce?

What are the ramifications for children whose parents divorce? It is a fact that about fifty percent of marriages fail -- but what happens to the children from those families? How do they respond in the years that follow the divorce? These issues are addressed in this paper.

Attorney Sandford M. Portnoy writes in the American Journal of Family Law that while various researchers disagree on how children react when their parents divorce, there is a consistent theme to the research -- children are negatively impacted to varying degrees. Portnoy begins his research article by put the divorce rate into "perspective"; one of every six adults living in the United States divorces "two or more times" (Portnoy, 2008, p. 126). Also, he reveals that the divorce rate in the U.S. "hovers around 50%" and between a half to two-thirds of divorced people get married again.

That all adds up to the fact that about 40% of the children in America will experience the divorce of their parents. And what do studies show about how children of divorced parents respond scholastically? Studies in the 1980s and 1990s that Portnoy references reflected that children of divorce "scored lower" when it came to academic success, conduct, "psychological adjustment, social competence, and health" (p. 126). Another study that followed divorced children for 25 years (Wallerstein and Lewis) reported that these children "changed radically almost overnight" and that after 25 years -- as adults looking back -- these children of divorce still remembered "the shock, unhappiness, loneliness, bewilderment, and anger" of those experiences during and following the act of divorce (p. 126).

In more recent times, the trend, according to Portnoy, has been toward less severe outcomes vis-a-vis children of divorce. For example, the author generalizes about recent studies saying children do "indeed struggle" while their families are torn apart and that they generally do not perform as well academically. But in some of those studies the pain doesn't last quite as long as it was previously believed. Meantime, the Hetherington and Kelly study that Portnoy references tracked 1,300 families over a twenty-year period and their results showed that children of divorce "do less well than other children" and they do "struggle to cope with the divorce" (p. 127). However, the Hetherington / Kelly results showed that by two years following the divorce "80%" of the children in those 1,300 families "are not significantly different on measure of adjustment" -- when compared to children from intact families (Portnoy, p. 127).

Portnoy summarizes some of the problems that children of divorce suffer through during their adolescence: they show "conduct disorders, antisocial behaviors" and difficult with "authorities" (p. 128). They are also "two to three times more likely to engage in adolescent delinquent behavior" than their peers from families that stayed together.