Saving your Child from Divorce Impact - Top ways to reduce the negative effect

Divorce is nasty and it breaks poeple life, not even parties involved but the families, specially children. It can create an enormous change into the kids life, whether boy or girl, child or teenager. The divorce is like a watershed event in the personal family life of the kids and the life changes drastically from what it was to what it is during divorce.

Top effects of divorce on children

Some of the challenges which kids face while witnessing the divoce of their parents involves the following, but not limited to:

1. They will see the loss of love between parents
2. They see that parents broke marriage commitment,
3. Need of adjustment of going back and forth between two different households
4. Daily absence of one of the parent
5. Creeping negative emotions like bitterness, stress, emotional pain, anxiety, fear, feeling abandoned and loss of self-esteem.
6. Children from divorced homes suffer academically.
7. They experience high levels of behavioral problems.

Long term impact of divorce on children

But there are some studies which also show that divorce affects most children, but the effect is of short run. Kids have remarkable capacity to recover rapidly after the initial blow. This University of Virginia study showed that the negative effects (which includes anxiety, anger, shock and disbelief) from divorce is very short term effect.

Different age - different Divorce related issues

There is also a fundamental difference between the way a child reacts and the way a adolescent reacts. The child tend to be more regressive in his actions and behaviour after divorce. On the other hand a adolescent or teenager will be more aggresive. This change in behaviour is due to the differing dependency of children on parents with age. Higher dependency of child on parents leads to regressive nature and less dependency in adolescents leads to aggression. Where the child felt grief, the adolescence has a grievance. Adolescents become more independent and self relying after witness divorcing parents. It is a tit for tat situation for them in which they can even hurt their parents for hurting their feelings.

Children on the other hand feel parents to be competent and capable of resolving any issue. This basic safety feeling of the child is broken at the time of divorce.

According to another study, girls of divorced parents are sexually active at a younger age as compared to girls of non-divorced parents.

Impact of Divorce on Children in their Romantic relationships when they grow is also known to be lasting and severe. According to another study, the children who have witnessed the parents divorce are insecure and not able to lead a happy romantic relationship when they grow in adults.

Things to do to keep divorce effect less

1. Talk about it with your kids - in the age appropriate manner
2. Reassuring them that they will be loved and they are not at fault for this issue the family is facing. Both the parents will be loving them, although they will be staying with one of the parent.
3. Take inputs fomr children around post divorce arrangements, but also clear that parents are responsible for decisions.
4. Do not change any of the usual activities and routines and do not stop seeing friends and extended family members
5. Never ask children to share opinion about the partner and spouse. At the end the person in question if the parent of the child, so no pin pointing and giving back to your spouse by means of children shaming.