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When a boat is sinking, all the passengers are given life preservers. When a marriage comes to an end, a similar state of emergency exists, but no one hands you a life preserver. You and your children are on your own, thrashing about, trying hard to survive. Many parents in this situation feel like helpless, frightened children themselves, wishing someone or something would save them. Imagine, then, how devastated and powerless children feel.
A separation and divorce is a shocking experience for them, for their very existence depends on their parents. They sustain tremendous losses and experience great pain, during, and after divorce. This crisis and tragedy of divorce is that this time, when parents are usually least able to help or even think about helping, is when children need their help most of all (Bienfeld, 1). The effects of divorce on children can be devastating.
To children, divorce does not mean the second chance that it so often means to one or both parents. To children it is the loss of their family - the entity that provides them with support, stability, security, and continuity in an often unpredictable world (Bienenfeld, 92). Children assume that their family is a given and that their parents are permanent. Studies uniformly find that divorce is a jolt to most children. Even youngsters that have lived in tense, conflict-ridden home for many years seldom think of divorce as a remedy for unhappiness; the remedy would be for parents to stop fighting (92). When suddenly divorce becomes reality, the assumptions children have accepted as givens and the structure they have relied on crumble, they feel not only vulnerable but powerless to have any influence on a situation the profoundly impacts their lives.
During a divorce children's feelings become extremely confused. Many children feel intensely rejected, perceiving that the parent is leaving them as well as the spouse. Intense fears of abandonment are not uncommon. In the widely cited California Children of Divorce study, Judith Wallenstein and Joan Kelly found that one-half of the children they studied were intensely afraid of being abandoned by their fathers, while one-third feared abandonment by their mothers. A few even feared they would be placed in foster homes. Not suprisingly, children's self-esteem frequently takes a plunge after divorce.
The majority of children are intensely sad and feel a deep sense of loss - of their family, their security, even their daily routines and family traditions (93). Many children have little control over their tears. Here is how a fourteen-year-old girl described how she felt when her parents were divorcing: "The divorce really affected me emotionally. I just felt bad all the time, I used to cry a lot, and when I wasn't crying, I would feel like crying...
it was just a terrible time in my life" Anger, also, is a fairly common reaction among children going through a divorce. Many feel betrayed by the very people they have trusted to protect and care for them. They feel no one is considering their needs, and they feel powerless to change the situation that is disrupting their lives. Some children hide their anger, fearing it will further upset or alienate their parents. Others have explosive outbursts. While some act out their anger in temper tantrum, noncompliance, aggressiveness.
destructiveness, rebelliousness, and Some youngsters, especially younger ones, are haunted by gnawing feelings that they are responsible for the divorce (91). Some will remember overhearing fights concerning them, while others will remember their parents' upset over their fights with their siblings. Some, even, will turn into model children, hoping they can undo the damage they think they have done. One child confessed the following the her mother years later: I felt I was being punished by God for being really bad, so I tried being really good so God would change His mind... and let Dad come home On the other hand, some youngsters feel relief when their parents divorce, although, it appears that this happens to only a relative few. One widely cited study found that fewer than ten percent felt this way - most often older children who lived in fear that the violence in the their homes would end in physical injury (Clapp, 94).
Several studies have reported that initial feelings of relief are sometimes temporary and are later replaced by sadness and anger. Do children of different ages react differently to divorce? Some people feel that divorce is easier on older children because they have more sources of support outside the family. However, divorce causes a unique set of problems for older children that do not concern their younger siblings (100). There is no clear-cut evidence that divorce is markedly easier on one age group than on another. Children of all ages experience intense sadness, anger, anxiety, fear, rejection, and loneliness (100).
However, studies find that age does affect children's initial reactions to divorce: It appears that each age group has its own Even infants, who seem oblivious to their surroundings, are affected by divorce because of the upset and tension transmitted to them by their parents, disruptions in their routines, and lapses in their care due to their parents' distress. Toddlers, also, tend to become irritable and aggressive, have temper tantrums, and regress to earlier forms of behavior in response to the stress in their homes and the sudden disappearance of a parent. Children between the ages of three and five-and-a-half (preschoolers) show the most dramatic changes in behavior due to divorce. Having a poor grasp of what is happening, they become bewildered and frightened. Preschoolers see their parents as one unit; therefore, once one leaves they become terrified that the other will abandon them, too (100). Routine separations become traumatic.
So do bedtimes, because these little ones fear no one will be there when they wake up. For the same reason they start waking up and crying during the night. Because of their intellectual stage of development, preschoolers think that the world revolves around them. This explains why they so often believe that the divorce is their fault and that the departing parent is Preschoolers are overwhelmed with anxiety, and they tend to express it in ways most parents find abhorrent: irritability, clinging, whining, increased aggressiveness, and temper tantrums. Due to their insecurity, these youngsters also generally lose their most recently acquired skills and regress to younger behavior (101). A return to toilet training accidents, security blankets, old toys, and thumb sucking are common.
Regression to younger behaviors are transient and generally last from a few weeks to a few months (101). Generally, six-to-eight-year-old children, particularly boys, are the most openly grief stricken. They feel the most loss and despair, and yearn the most for their absent parent. They believe that their family unit is vital for their survival.
Their anguish is so deep that they can not concentrate in school or Also, they re very susceptible to feelings of abandonment and rejection. They worry that they will be replaced. These young ones try to be loyal to both parents and end up feeling torn apart, and they tend to redirect their anger on to A shaken sense of identity and of right and wrong tends to plague nine-to-twelve-year-olds. This is the age of grappling with these issues, and children usually rely heavily on their parents' identity and values in defining their own (102). Their distress is usually expressed in physical complex...
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