06-09-2016, 12:31 PM
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In today’s society divorce has become a fairly Orthodox thing. Married couples are getting divorced due to various reasons , either because a spouse having an affair, a loss of romantic feelings, Lack of understanding, conflicts in the marriage, and any other types of problems. The one key factor that the parents don’t think about is, the effect divorce will have on children. According to various studies divorce can have a very negative impact on the children. Children from divorced families may suffer Academically,May get involved in Drugs during teenage years a, and it may haunt them into adulthood. Children can attempt to cope with the changes in their lives; however, their lives will forever be disrupted.
"There may be intense marital conflict between divorcing parents and debates about child custody and children of divorce have to move schools, and may fall behind in math and making friends and not catch up," says study researcher Hyun Sik Kim, a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Of about 3,500 elementary school kids who were followed from kindergarten through fifth grade, children of divorce experienced setbacks in math and social skills and were more prone to feeling anxious, lonely, sad, or tended to have low-self-esteem, compared with their peers whose parents remained married.”(Mann 2011). According to this study, these problems began surfacing when divorce began, and that it did not get better or worse when divorce proceedings were finalized. According to Hyun Sik Kim, the younger the child is when their parents' divorce, the greater the impact of the divorce. The reason being is that the younger the child are, the more callow and insecure they are, and seeing the parental bond sever tears them apart, and is a change that they are not willing to accept, causing them to well up with various negative emotions and to act out in school and receive poor grades. Going from a two parent household to a one parent household can create other problems like joint custody issues where a child suddenly has two homes and being sent back and forth between them weekly W. Bradford Wilcox, PhD, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and the director of the National Marriage Project, says that the finding that changes occur only after the divorce begins is "interesting, surprising, and new." It is usually always assumed that kids in families on the verge of divorce do as well as other kids, but when their parents relationship is officially done for, they cannot cope with it. "The take-away is that the average spouse or couple who are coming up against some difficulty should rethink divorce and put their kids' welfare first unless there are patterns of domestic violence, emotional, verbal abuse,"(Mann 2011). 20% of the teachers surveyed responded agree, with the fact that, kids grades suffer due to divorce ( Raynish 2007)
Susie Vanderlip is an internationally eminent professional speaker, author and expert on youth and family issues. Vanderlip worked with a group of approximately 15 teenagers in 9th thru 12th grades from various different high schools. Several teens stated “ they began and continued to use pot and/or alcohol to manage the feelings of confusion and inconsistency in their lives when parents divorced. All the teens agreed that divorce creates a significant emotional need in teens and many use pot and/or alcohol to cope with the impact of parental divorce on their family lives”.(Vanderlip 2011). Teenagers that live with separated parents are often left by themselves longer than they should be. The responsibility of a parent to take care of their child alone can be very difficult and teenagers are often given certain levels of freedom, that they can't handle. To make themselves feel happy, and to fulfill the emptiness inside themselves teenagers get involved with drugs.
It may seem like that a children may eventually gets over divorce , but unfortunately it follows them into adulthood. “Psychologist Judith Wallerstein followed a group of children of divorce from the 1970s into the 1990s. She began interviewing them at 18 months and then 5, 10, 15 and 25 years after the divorce, she eventually expected them to be fine. But what she found was shocking: Even 25 years after the divorce, these children continued to experience many problems. The children in Wallerstein's study were especially challenged when they began to form their own romantic relationships. As Wallerstein explains, "Contrary to what we have long thought, the major impact of divorce does not occur during childhood or adolescence. Rather, it rises in adulthood as serious romantic relationships move center stage . . . Anxiety leads many [adult children of divorce] into making bad choices in relationships, giving up hastily when problems arise, or avoiding relationships altogether.” Another shocking factor was, that children from divorced families tend to view pre-marital sex, and cohabitation more favourably, this is very disturbing news, since cohabiting couples are more likely to get divorced. This fact is confirmed by Arielle Kuperberg Ph.D, who is Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. ”Couples who cohabited before marriage had a 33 percent higher chance of divorce than couples who moved in together after the wedding ceremony. In light of those findings, some commentators have argued that reducing the stigma attached to living together outside marriage has been a mistake, leading many young couples to make decisions that put their future marriage at risk.”(Kuperberg 2014).