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Essay on Devastating Affects of Divorce on Children
Long-term outcome of psychological trauma in childhood is inevitably difficult to trace or to identify. Many complexly interacting factors shape the lives of children, and the conceptual and methodological problems in studying any single factor or set of factors are formidable. Moreover, we have in recent years become increasingly aware of the enduring effects of psychic trauma, and that these effects may not be visible immediately or in subsequent specific behaviors or symptoms, but may forever shatter the individual's guiding conception of the world as relatively safe and reliable.
Theoretical issues include the lack of clarity regarding expectable continuity and discontinuity in development; perplexing individual differences and wide variation in immediate and subsequent response to what appear to be similar experiences; methodological issues of cohort problems and the confounding fact that psychological configurations discerned at any cross-sectional vantage point inevitably highlight that which is most salient at that developmental stage and may obscure patterns of behavior that become prominent at a subsequent stage. Thus, observations about children of divorce at the point of their entry into young adulthood differ significantly from observations of the same group during mid adolescence.
Beyond the broad considerations that attach to all longitudinal investigations, the study of divorce and its long-range consequences for children within the post divorce or remarried family poses special problems. For divorce, as we have finally recognized, is not a single circumscribed event, but a multistage process of radically changing family relationships. This process begins in the failing marriage, sometimes many years prior to the marital breakdown, may include one or more separations within the marriage, and extends over years following the decisive separation and the legal divorce.
Many families experience not only extended instability in family functioning, but discontinuity in their physical and social environment as well. A goodly number face major decline in their social and economic circumstances, and diminished educational opportunities for their children......
