Families and Divorce: Mothers’, Fathers’ and Children’s Perspectives

Abstract

Divorce has become a common experience in family life in the UK. However the emotional effects of divorce on adults and children and the differential individual meanings people give to divorce, require particular attention from counsellors and therapists. In the early 1990s children under the age of sixteen in about 160 000 families went through an experience of parental divorce. Of these children one in three were less than five years old; a further seven thousand children were between five and ten years old (Haskey, 1994). A majority of these young children are likely to experience further family changes in the context of one or both parents remarrying, so divorce is often part of a far more complex series of transitions. Research from many countries has shown how aspects of the divorce experience have short-term negative effects for many children. The long-term effects are much more complex to chart, since many factors other than the divorce itself are likely to affect children’s lives. Statistically children from divorcing families are no more at risk of emotional disturbance, as shown by psychiatric measurements, than children whose parents have not divorced, and how well children adapt largely depends on how their parents manage the process. While there is little hard evidence about what helps children to manage the process better, we do have good indications from a number of different sources.