Psychology Paper

Impact of Divorce in Children 4

Impact of Divorce on Children

Cherod M. Jones

Florida Institute of Technology

Lifespan Development

Professor Natalie Fala

2/12/17

Divorce is when two spouses choose to terminate their marriage. While it may happen for many reasons, the main one usually is infidelity and misunderstandings. Not all divorced couples have children involved, but most of them do. This is quite an unfortunate occurrence, mainly because one could never tell how they expect their children to react. To understand this, we can rely on two articles that are internet-sourced. The first is the article titled ‘IS Divorce Bad for Children?’ written by Arkowitz and Lilienfeld. According to them, children, upon receiving news regarding their parents’ divorce, react differently. Surprising enough (in a good way, though), most of these children experience adverse impacts of the news at the initial stages but recover from the news quite fast (of course with some adjustments here and there) (Arkowitz & Lilienfeld, 2013). However, this does not imply they fully recovered from the blow, as some children tend to start showing how affected they are by their parents’ divorce when they are a bit older, say teenage years. Their reaction and well-being are mainly determined by how the divorced parents behave and carry themselves while around their children.

The second article is titled ‘7 Ways Divorce Affects Kids, according to the Kids Themselves’, written by Brittany Wong. Per this article, when children are trying to vent out their feelings, they develop certain life-defining character traits. Some may choose to be protective especially when they get hurt seeing their mothers and sisters cry, or they may become more responsibility and try to help their single parent to raise income to support the family now that the other parent is not around to contribute (mostly the father) (Wong, 2014). Funny enough, some children are relieved when divorce occurs because they do not get along as much with one of the parents as they do with the other. Or one of the parents was always too hard on them, or when one parent spoke unpleasant things about the other parent (that the children found to be untrue and unfair).

What intrigues me about the children’s reactions to divorce is the fact that most children react to divorce much better than the adults would have expected. This makes a significant contribution to the developmental psychology knowledge base in that it reminds psychologists that not every bad situation is linked to long-term negative emotional and cognitive responses.

REFERENCE

Arkowitz, H., & Lilienfeld, S. O. (2013, March 01). Is Divorce Bad for Children? Retrieved February 07, 2017, from Scientific American Mind: www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-divorce-bad-for-children/

Wong, B. (2014, August 28). 7 Ways Divorce Affects Kids, According to the Kids Themsleves. Retrieved February 02, 2017, from Huffpost: m.huffpost/us/entry/5730980