Past Reflections and Future Considerations: Divorce-Positioning Children For

Past Reflections and Future Considerations: Divorce-Positioning Children for

Success

Blaise P. Blastos

Wasthtenaw Community College

I think it was the second or maybe it was the third parent that spoke in our lecture relating the developmental milestones of their children was when I realized that despite being a parent I struggled to recall with any great certainty when my son started to walk. When class ended I remembered walking down the hall wondering what type of person I was not having a firm grasp on details of how my son Blaise Alex developed as an infant and toddler. I struggled to justify my lack of memories and had a strong desire to jump back in time to relive those moments. Our son Blaise Alex was born on October 25, 2003 in the middle of my deployment to Iraq. I returned home that next year in March of 2004 a father of an infant son whom I hadn't seen since he was in the NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit) after his birth. Perhaps one of the reasons I wasn't able to fully remember the details of his milestones is that his mother took care of all that-I was trying to get back into the swing of things, work,etc. after being gone for so long. The marriage that his mother and I had didn't last long - we married on March 12, 2003 and we were divorced approximately four years later on December 27, 2007.

During the divorce process and soon after the divorce was finalized I found myself constantly wondering and considering the potential impact(s) of my decision would be on my son's well-being. The decision to divorce was a difficult one, one that I never thought that I'd have to entertain let alone carry out. Perhaps it was fortuitous to presently find myself in a child developmental psychology class in which we were offered the opportunity to explore the impact of divorce on children and to offer suggestions based on our research to mitigate the effects of an environmental stressor such as divorce would/could have on a child.

Divorce is one of the most common environmental stressors that children will experience during their lifetimes. One constant of any divorce is that it thrusts children into a world in which reacting to change may severely impact a child's life in both the short term and long term. Feldman posed the question in this way (2010), "How do children react to divorce? The answer depends on how soon you ask the question following a divorce as well as how old the children are at the time of the divorce" (p.323). There is general consensus that divorce places children at risk for three types of adjustment difficulties-externalizing problems, internalizing problems, and cognitive deficits. A very consistent result of divorce for children is many children exhibit behaviors such as delinquency, aggression, and disobedience. It has been documented that second and third grade children from divorced families are more depressed and anxious than children from two-parent families. Many children of divorced parents do perform more poorly compared to children from two-parent families indicating there is a correlation with cognitive deficits and divorce.

Perhaps the critical point to consider is does a relationship exist between externalizing, internalizing, and cognitive deficits or grades that children of divorce exhibit? Lansford (2006) found that "the experience of divorce is related to trajectories of behavioral outcomes and academic grades for children, but these effects vary according to the timing of the divorce." (p.296) Taken one step further, parental divorce during elementary school is related to more adverse effects on internalizing and externalizing problems than is later divorce, whereas later divorce is related to more adverse effects on grades. She continues, "In contrast to externalizing and internalizing problems, it appears that parental divorce is more strongly related to children's academic performance when children experience a later, rather than earlier, divorce" (Landsford, 2006, p. 297) attempting to clarify her study in further detail. A key part of this study is the conclusion that children may benefit from interventions focused on preventing internalizing and externalizing problems, while adolescents can benefit from interventions focused on promoting academic achievement.

To try and ascertain how well or how poorly children of divorce fare in comparison to their counterparts in "intact" families, it is essential to consider the variables affecting divorced children's development. There are generally six critical factors-parental loss, economic loss, increased life stress, poor parental adjustment, lack of parental competence, and exposure to conflict between parents that negatively impact a child's life during divorce. Parental loss involves the loss of contact with one parent and the corresponding loss of knowledge and resources of that parent. Children living with a single parent experience a loss of economic resources. Divorce creates scenarios in which the child must make adjustments to changes in relationships with friends and family members increasing life stress. According to Velez (2011), "The current study demonstrated that by increasing one of children's most important interpersonal