Does divorce damage children?

Couples hesitate to consider divorce when they have young children thinking how they should make a dysfunctional marriage work for the sake of their kids. But does that help or hurt?

At My Divorce Guide, of the support requests we receive, 64% are from people with kids, out of which roughly 82% have adolescents to look after.

The common element in all these conversations is the concern for their kids -
How will the divorce impact them?
Should I stay back and reconsider once my child is older?

Not just on our platform -
"Will my kids be okay after a divorce?" is commonly queried on Google search
"How does divorce affect children?" is commonly queried on social media.

Some of the questions that prompted our webinar and now this post are -

• How does divorce affect/damage children?

• How to protect kids during divorce?

• How bad is divorce for a child?

• Will my kids be okay after the divorce?

• At what age do children remember divorce?

• What is the earliest age at which a child can be impacted by divorce?

We addressed these with the help of Tanvi.

Photo by Kenny Eliason on Unsplash

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“The act of divorce itself doesn’t inherently damage children,” says Tanvi, a child counsellor who works extensively with children and families.

She continues -

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What affects them, however, is what led to the divorce in the first place -

The chronic conflict and conflictual environment, emotional unpredictability, having a sense of being caught in the middle, and losing a sense of safety—not just physical safety, but also emotional safety. Like, where am I going to stay? Who is going to pick me up from school? Who will be paying my school bills?

Of course, these are not things that kids actively think about, but the emotional sense of safety, especially for young kids, if that is challenged, that is where the impact is seen.

However, again, divorce is like every other stressful event — loss of a parent, financial problems, Covid-19, etc—it’s a life stressor.

It is not a guaranteed trauma.

I have kids who have come out of divorces with really healthy mindsets of understanding what happened and what led to the breakdown. I’ve also had kids who have witnessed a very traumatic or a very challenging marriage between their parents. However, after the divorce, they were able to understand that the overall health of the family was better after the separation.

However, at the same time, the idea that it does not lead to stress is something we can have a conversation about. Some areas that long-term difficulties are strongly linked to are: ongoing parental hostility, neglect, or emotional unavailability, rather than the divorce itself. That’s important to acknowledge when we talk about the impact of divorce or separation on children.

Some impacts seen on Young Children

One of the questions that was asked is: What is the age at which children are most likely to be harshly impacted by divorce? Again, there’s no single hard stage.
Every developmental stage has different vulnerabilities. Sometimes there is irritability or clinginess, especially around new people.
There may be some form of regression in very young children. For example, kids who have just started to speak can regress to not speaking or becoming mum. Again, the regression is just temporary and not a permanent thing.
When their sense of safety is challenged, and there is emotional turmoil in their environment, young kids respond — even if they don’t understand what is happening.

When they are a little bit older, they tend to blame themselves. For example, they see that something set the parents off and often assign that blame to themselves and try to internalize the cause of the divorce.

Fear of abandonment is another major thing that carries not just from a young age but is something that we see in adult children of divorce as well. They also report (a lot of times) that this was one thing that remained unaddressed by the parents.

With young kids, anger and other symptoms or signs of distress often show up physically. So there may be headaches, tummy aches, and sometimes even panic attacks. These are signs we typically see in very young boys and girls who experience emotional and physical turmoil due to the divorce that they’re witnessing.

Another thing happens amongst kids around the ages of 7, 8, 9, when they start understanding stories, conversations, and fairy tales. When they have that concept of a story, they often try to fantasize about how they can get their parents back together. There’s even a very famous movie about this called The Parent Trap, which actually talks about this entire phenomenon where kids really imagine how they can get their parents, their family, back together.

What exists in the core of these impacts?

To form healthy attachment patterns, children need to experience love and safety from their caregivers. The love that we give, the security that we give them, the fact that, whenever a child is crying, somebody’s picking them up and shushing them, whenever they’re hungry, they are given food, whenever they feel hurt, somebody is soothing them. These are all attachment patterns that we are kind of coding with children. And if those things are missing, what children understand about the world is that it is a distrustful place, and I, as a vulnerable being, don’t have enough resources, and that there aren’t enough people around me to make my growth in this world easier. So parents, as a result, play a very important role in making sure that kids feel secure, safe, and grounded as they’re growing up. And that journey or that process is called attachment. That attachment gets impacted by emotional or environmental turmoil in your surroundings.

During the breakdown of marriages, kids witness a lot of fights, often mud-slinging, and sometimes even violence. That causes fear. And if that fear is in a chronic state, where you’re seeing this every day, you’re growing up seeing this, you don’t feel happy, you don’t feel like you have a safe home to go to.

Children also learn emotional regulation from their primary caregivers. How are you supposed to react or how are you supposed to respond to situations in your life? For example, if something is causing you frustration, are you able to adapt to that emotionally? If something is leading you to feel happy, are you able to feel those emotions in an appropriate and adaptive manner?

Emotional regulation is also disrupted if not modeled with young people. They need parents who are calm, caring, and responsive. They’re forming their first ideas of emotions by witnessing and looking at their parents. So if there is any disruption in that process, emotional regulation becomes hard for kids—even if they don’t have a clear memory of incidents.

Will children be okay after a divorce?

For most families, yes, a 100% yes. To ensure that happens, however, parents have to be emotionally present, the child’s feelings have to be acknowledged, and life has to become stable and not more chaotic.

Children don’t need the family to remain together (in the traditional sense); they just need the family to feel safe. What serves as a barrier for parents from seeking divorce is that they believe that staying together will create a sense of safety or security for their young child. However, with my work, I have noticed that children are far happier with two happy parents, as opposed to two parents who are constantly in conflict, where a sense of safety is never established for them.

So the idea that you have to stay together for your child and maintain a relationship that is not working out, as a result of which both of you are not feeling happy, that emotion seeps in, and a child eventually catches on. They can witness it, and they also kind of imbibe those emotions.

Eventually, all kids need is to feel safe.

After a divorce, with time, with that sense of safety established, kids are able to move on and even be pretty happy! They can have their own individual journeys of growth and resilience, and go on to create their own unique understanding of the situation they come from.

Parting thoughts

It [Witnessing your parents’ divorce] is a tough thing. It is a thing that is difficult. But it is not a trauma, it’s a stressor. What is traumatic is if the conflict sustains, if the hostility sustains, if these narratives sustain - that we’re broken because we come from this broken system or a family—that is where we are as parents and adults have to change our conversations around terms like divorce and separation. It’s good that people are choosing themselves. Right. That’s it. That is exactly what we want to model for our kids -

That you have the right and the responsibility to take care of yourself.

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Thanks for taking the time to read through this. If you found this post resourceful, you might also like this.

If you’re going through a difficult transition, remember that support is available.

Have questions? Feel free to dm the team and we might be able to answer them in future segments.