Effects of Divorce on Children

Essay by ranelson09College, UndergraduateB, March 2012

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Effects of Divorce on Children

Introduction

Each year, over 1 million American children suffer from the divorce of their parents according to statistics. The divorce rate has immensely increased over the past few decades, and the lives of children are affected by the change that has transpired in their home life. In today's society most people accept divorce as a way of life, completely unaware of the damage they are doing to their children. Married couples today are getting divorced due to a variety of reasons, either because of conflicts in the marriage, loss of romantic feelings, a spouse committing adultery, and other types of marital problems. Generally, most divorced couples have children that are very young, and due to their age, the child typically has no idea on how to cope with an event such as divorce. These children will have to learn to cope with their parent's divorce at a young age, affecting them in positive or negative ways.

According to www.freedictionary.com, divorce is defined as "1. The legal dissolution of a marriage. 2. A complete or radical severance of closely connected things." So not only does the act of divorce have a legalistic element, but also physical, emotional, educational, and social elements due to the severance of closely connected things as aforementioned. These varietal elements have adverse effects on child development and also have a bearing on adolescence and adulthood once the child grows up. Many psychologists and researchers have endeavored to answer the questions of whether divorce has a correlational or causation-based relationship with the outcome of the child. In other words, is the child negatively effected as a direct result of their parents divorce? According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, "children may positively deal with the consequences of their parent's divorce; however, the majority...