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What Is Divorce Like for Kids?

What's divorce like for kids? An earthquake--with life altering aftershocks that continue for years. For children divorce is not one life event but a series of changes and revelations, framed by their own increasing cognitive skills and social sophistication, brought on by parent actions or admissions.

Divorce is unlike any other childhood trauma--especially for the 50% who lose contact with the non-residential parent. And, as with the earthquake, the damage or the emotional, physical, and social expense of coping isn't always immediately evident. Individually the parents may successfully recover from the divorce trauma and move on to new careers, new relationships, new self-image, but what makes parents happy does not automatically make children happy or serve their best-interests.

Children paint a dramatic picture of this experience through the feelings they voice. Unfortunately in an effort to protect them and to try to make them happier, society rarely gives kids the opportunity to have their say. That's unfortunate since a clear sense of their perspective would help parents, teachers, social workers, lawyers, judges, and other caring adults respond appropriately to certain behaviors and initiate long overdue changes in the system.

What are the colors, what are the elements in the pictures? What does the series of pictures which each child draws reveal? Over the last twenty years children have told us that ambiguity, discomfort, stigmatization, confusion, and a sense of being different dominate their lives.

Ambiguity and vacillation:

Sadness at the loss is often mixed with relief that the fighting, hostility, abuse, or emotional frigidity they've lived with before the divorce is hopefully ended. Of course when the parental warfare continues, they experience sadness with no sense of relief.

As time goes on life seems more like a series of "good-byes" than hellos, casting a shadow on the future, limiting possibilities. They discover that both parents are changed by the divorce, in many ways and for reasons no one chooses to divulge to them. Many find themselves divorced from both father and mother, residential and non-residential parent.

As part of this process children swing between loyalties and feelings of guilt, recrimination and anger, which arise when they are placed in the middle as messengers or enlisted to keep secrets. In most families both parents deceive with self-serving stories which compromise trust and believability--the basic foundation stones of a healthy parent-child relationship.

Desolation and discomfort:

Children constantly express their regret at being deprived of the comfort of having both parents as a daily part of their lives. Even when parents are cooperative, share time equally, and are minimally distracted by their own issues, it's never the same as before they split up. What children of divorce experience is different than the child of the single parent or the bereaved child. For the latter two the parent they've lost can't be there with them. The loss can be adapted to and overcome. For the children of divorce there is always the sense of being unwanted, unworthy--because the parent who they are not with could be more a part of their lives.

For many children these feelings are reinforced because they feel at fault for the divorce. The burden of fault makes them feel badly about themselves, but they can' resist clinging to the sense of power it endows. After all, if I caused the divorce then I can fix it. As they discover that they can't fix it, the loss and desolation deepens.

Different and distinguishable:

Not of their own choice, most children feel that they have been made recognizable when their parents divorce. Though they may know other kids whose parents have divorced, that rarely minimizes their anger, withdrawal, or the desperate, often self-destructive, attempts to become like everyone else. Society's stigmatization of divorce as a failure, and the lack of broad support that has been offered to addicts, the homeless, and other deserving groups, reinforces the unwanted isolation.

Confusion:

Even years after their parents split up many children have little sense of why it all happened. Paradoxically words of reassurance often raise the anxiety level. "Love", "always", "I'll be available" take on a toxic quality since children heard their parents use them with each other. Now, after the separation, the words no longer have enduring value or believability. Especially when spoken by the parent to them the words raise doubts and concern about when it will end.

Confusion is also engendered by the lack of flexibility that often results as parent vie for more time with the kids. While they hear everyone talking about their best interests, the visitation schedule generally serves their parents interests more than their own--in part because they rarely get a voice in its creation. As they develop new interests, they often feel unfairly restrained by rules made long ago and puzzled by the daunting impossibility--including court time and vast expense--to change the rules, though one or both parents may agree that it is a good idea.