The End of Our Journey

If you’re on this page your clearly interested in learning about how divorce can affect children. Being a child of separation not only once but twice, I see the effects it can have on children not only in myself but in my siblings. And it’s something that people overlook because children deal with it in different ways.  With that being said I wanted to give you guys a taste of what I learned over the course of this semester, while researching this topic. I chose to do this because it’s something people should look for and learn about especially if you’re dealing with children.

Children of divorce or separated parents show increased behavioral problems and the marital conflict that comes with parent divorce places the child’s social abilities at risk. Even intact families that have low levels of conflict, children still have issues. There are several studies out there that suggest that parental conflict affects the outcomes of children’s behavior problems, regardless of marital status. Overall, young adults are best off when raised by two continuously married parents with a low-conflict relationship. Children who engage in fighting and stealing at school, are more likely to have come from broken homes then children who came from households with married parents. Children of divorced families are more than twice as likely to drop out of high school than children from intact families. Boys whose parents divorced while they were in elementary school tend to develop problems over the years following their parent’s separation. Children from intact families have fewer behavioral problems in school. For example, a first-grade child born to married mothers are less likely to show disruptive behavior, like disobeying a teacher or aggressive behavior to peers, than children born to single mothers.

            Guys I have to tell you something! Not everything online that is supposed to be informational is accurate or explained to you guys in its full entirety. They can even be biased because of the writer’s views but even if the writer wants to reach a certain audience.  I say this, because the popular sites are what you guys tend to read first. For this assignment, the popular media article I chose was from The Our Family Wizard Blog, I chose this because it gives you the information you need but it doesn’t show you the research somebody has done to find why all of the above is true.

            Robert Sampson, a professor of sociology in Chicago. He reported that after studying 171 cities in the United States with populations over 100,000 that the divorce rates predicted the robbery rate of any given area. In these communities, he found that the lower divorce rates showed higher supervision of children which in turn showed lower crime rates. In 1994, it was reported in Wisconsin that the incarceration rate of juvenile delinquents was twelve times higher with children of divorced parents then with children of married parents. In a British longitudinal study of males aged eight to thirty-two, David Farrington, found experiencing parental divorce before the age of 10 to be a major predictor of adolescent delinquency and committing a crime as an adult.         

            Divorce reduces children being able to handle conflict. The difference between marriages that remain intact and those that end in divorce lies primarily in the parent’s ability to handle conflict and moving towards an agreement. For example, compared to students from intact families, college students from divorced families use violence more frequently to resolve conflict and are more likely to be aggressive and physically violent with their peers. The National longitudinal study of adolescent Health shows that children from married families are less frequently suspended, expelled or delinquent, and less likely to experience school’s problems that children from other family structures. 

Do you see what I was saying? Parents who are going through divorce should be reading information like this so they can act accordingly. Maybe if this kind of information was more accessible to those who aren’t doing research, parents would try not to have such horrible divorces. I also feel that teachers should look into this as well because children tend to act out in school since they are around a bunch of other students and people who aren’t their parents.

            Well guys, that all for me! Seems like we have come to the end of our journey. I hope that I showed you what I see through these big brown eyes, like I said I would do when I started our journey.

https://www.ourfamilywizard.com/blog/behavioral-issues-children-after-divorce

David P. Farrington, “Implications of Criminal Career Research for the Prevention of Offending,” Journal of Adolescence 13, (1990

Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services, Division of Youth Services, “Family Status of Delinquents in Juvenile Correctional Facilities in Wisconsin” (1994)