In psychology, we were learning about marriage and divorce. A fact from our textbook stated “Divorce is a fact of life within 20 years of marriage for at least 40% of current marriages.” (Positive Psychology and Wellbeing: Applications for Enhanced Living) This struck me as a crazy number and got me thinking of how much divorce can impact people, especially children.

Robert. E. Emery, Ph.D., conducted a study to see what effect divorce has on children. His study was to see if mediation, intervention in a dispute in order to resolve it, could positively impact the long term effects of divorce for children. In his study, he used random assignment like we had talked about in class. He flipped a coin to see if the families being studies would go to mediation or adversary settlement. The sample was young families with a low income. The study was set up that the mediation was around 5 years and focused mostly toward the grief aspect of divorce.

The first part of the study showed that most of the families who went through mediation stayed out of court. It also stated that when the mediation failed, parents tried to work things out with the help of
lawyers.

Another graph that I found to be interesting was the involvement of the parents in litigation vs. mediation. The graph clearly shows that when couples going through a divorce went through mediation instead of litigation, the child had much more involvement with both parents than just the one we live with.

In an article written by divorce.usu.edu, “Children of divorce are 2-3 times more likely to experience a divorce compared to children who did not experience a divorce growing up”. Contrary to what the above article stated, this article says that divorce really impacts children BEFORE the divorce actually occurs, instead of year after. However, it still agrees that it will has effects throughout their lives, just not as significant. “Children are developing physically, socially, emotionally, educationally, morally, and spiritually; research shows that divorce can affect children in each of these developmental areas”.

I discovered another article from the MDRC. Their mission is to build knowle
dge to improve social policy. This article is titled “The Effects of Marriage and Divorce on Families and Children”. Author Gordon Berlin writes, children who grow up in an intact, two-parent family with both biological parents present do better on a wide range of outcomes than children who grow up in a single-parent family. Single parenthood is not the only, nor even the most important, cause of the higher rates of school dropout, teenage pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, or other negative outcomes we see; but it does contribute independently to these problems”.

This means that children whose parents are still in a successful marriage performed better on certain tasks and had less of a risk of teenage pregnancy and juvenile delinquency. By no means does this suggest that divorce will cause any of these problems or deem that someone is less intelligent to complete tasks. It just shows the correlation between divorce an
d these factors. Correlation is not causation.

Overall, I have found that divorce does have some impacts on children, but the way parents handle their divorce can GREATLY impact how their child lives the rest of their life.