A study done with more than 200 divorced mothers and their children shows that divorce counselling can help kids avoid trouble when they get into their teen years.

I’ve summarized a report on the study by SAMHSA below and you can read the complete article on this page.

Report Summary

Most children of divorced parents in the United States (40 percent of all children) adjust well to their parents’ split.

Researchers at the University of Arizona tried to find out whether post-divorce counseling for children helped prevent some negative outcomes of divorce-conduct problems, dropping out of school, substance use, high-risk sexual behaviors, and depression-during the teen years.
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Finding affordable legal help when involved in a divorce or working out child custody issues can be a daunting task.

This can be especially so when parents or children are separated by state lines. Every state has it’s own version of child custody and divorce law. The issues can become very complicated.

Many state bar associations provide free information on the divorce and child custody law. This information is not always easy to find though so to help make things simpler I’m putting together a sort of directory of links to legal information from state bar associations. The list is not complete yet. You can find the first group of listings, Alaska to Hawaii, on this page. I’ll post again when another group is ready.

It’s easy to think of our children - even our teens - as vulnerable and at risk from the effects of divorce. Teenagers may be older and more “worldly wise” (or so they like to think) but they are still children and at the stage where they are forming a strong sense of identity.

Will divorce hamper this important process? Not necessarily, according to a study by sociologist Chris Manning.

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Parents worry about how divorce will affect their children but it’s easy to forget how resilient - and astute - children can be. At the end of the day, via some tears and tantrums, they are capable of accepting your decision to divorce.

The more children accept divorce, the less divorce affects children. However, their acceptance depends on two things. Firstly, how well you communicate with your children and secondly, whether or not your decision to divorce makes sense in their black-and-white world.

Continue reading "Divorce Affects Children Most..."

There are thousands of studies and statistics relating to the effects of divorce on children. In most cases, the outlook is pretty gloomy, making the decision to divorce that much more difficult for people with children.

There’s no doubt that children of divorce do experience emotional and behavioral problems. What troubles me is these studies and statistics give the impression that divorce is solely responsible for those problems.

I think this is unrealistic. And I think it’s dangerously misleading for people trying to do the right thing by their children.

The fact is, by the time their parents reach the point of divorce, most children have suffered already - from the effects of a bad marriage. The trouble is, social scientists don’t take note of how these children feel and behave until after their parents divorce. And then blame their emotional and behavioral problems on, you guessed it, divorce.

Unfortunately, this leads many parents to spare their children the effects of divorce, leaving them stuck instead with the possibly far more damaging effects of their marriage.

In “Divorce Ends Conflict - Or Does It?” I took a quick look at the belief that divorce can have a positive effect on children by ending the trauma of witnessing parents at war. I concluded by saying that parents will always be parents, divorced or not. But will they still be arguing?

In other words, if parents continue to argue after their divorce (and statistics suggest they will), children won’t gain from divorce. It’s the same situation constant conflict but worse: one parent is no longer at home.

You might dislike, despise or even hate your spouse but your children don’t. Divorce and the subsequent absence of a parent is an enormous loss for them perhaps the very worst effect of divorce.

Statistics also show that in many cases divorce actually heightens conflict, or causes it where little existed before. After all, the process of divorce is hardly designed to make you the best of friends.

So what does this mean?
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