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Josh Provine Sociology Joseph Simpson

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Joshua Provine SOC 1113 Joseph Simpson 18 April 2013 Divorces and How They Affect Their Children Divorce is a terrible thing for a couple to go through. A couple who were once in love and but they arent in love anymore. One could have cheated on the other spouse or one of the spouses doesnt make enough money and cant provide for his or her family and one of the parents decided to leave him or her for someone else. The whole divorce idea is stressful for the couple but if they have kids it makes the situation even more difficult. Once you become a parent your whole life changes and you start doing things that might have never done before you had kids. When people go through a divorce the whole idea of one big happy family goes out the door and the kids are going to find out what its like to grow up with two parents. Does a divorce affected the kids and how does it? Does it make them more likely to get a divorce or less likely to get one for when they get married later or when they grow up. Many questions will be answered in this paper. Does it affect the kids or the parents more when a family is going through a divorce? When looking through articles and journals I have found that many people had written on this subject and so there is a lot of information that explains that when a couple is going through a divorce they are more willing to compromise things on get the divorce over with. The parents

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want to fight over every little thing because he or she because they shouldnt have to give up their stuff. But they understand it isnt far to let their children go through all the fighting and screaming that they have been doing a lot of lately. Parents going through a divorce who have kids under the age of seven are 80% more likely to stop the fighting and screaming when the kids are around. If the kids are between the age of 8-12 they are more likely to do it 60% of the time when they are around the preteens. And when the kids are teenagers the parents are less likely to stop fighting when the kids are around only 34%. Lately serves have been done to see if any mental health and what they found was incredible. Children who experienced parental divorce were 50% more likely to develop health problems than children from intact two parent families.(Utz) The fact is, this is a very scary and people need more research needs to been done on how to improve this. I think the main issue is that kids feel like that the parents dont love them enough because they feel like the parents divorced because of them. This makes them feel like betrayed and the only way they think their parents will love them if they are sick so both the parents will take care of them. This is my thought so I could be completely wrong but just not enough research has been done to know will this happens 50% of the time. Kids are kids, they experience a whole lot when they are growing up but today growing up and your parents get a divorce is at 42% of all marriages end in divorce. That is a shocking fact that 42% of marriages end in divorce, the thing is people today are rushing into marriages, getting married for the money, cheat on your spouse because yours is off doing other thing at his or hers job, or maybe the spark was just too high at the beginning and there isnt anything left after a couple of years of married. Last year alone there were 117,558 divorces. The article from this is from states that this number is down from 2010 but not by much. From 1990 to 2005 the divorce rate of marriages was at 45% of all marriages ended in a divorce. That means that

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55% percent of marriages survive. Is marriage not a marathon anymore, I have always been told its not a sprint, its a marathon. Just think if all that 117,558 number, just think of all numbers of children who had to through their parents last year that is way too much. Kids are a huge part of the family they put stress, love, and happiness. When they are little they will love you and you think they are the most precious and the biggest crime they will do is being way to cute. But we all know kids change when they get older because when we get to our preteens we like to say no way too much and we start going through changes. Once we become teenagers we like to hang around our friends more and start to understand a lot more things but we think we know everything when we really dont a clue what we are doing. I talked about all three of these stages of life because most of the articles I found talked about kids, preteens, and teenagers when talking about how they react or understand what is going on during their parents divorce. First, kids from when they are born to the age of seven are in the stage where they dont really understand what is going on. All they know is that mommy and daddy will not be living together anymore and they will have two Christmas now. They will grow up that life is normal with their parents situation being like this. They never really feel that it is their fault for splitting up. For preteens children, they know what is going on but dont fully still quite dont understand the full effect of the divorce. Mon and day tell them sort of whats going on but dont tell them quite everything. Many articles I read stated that many parent just told the kids what was going to happen but didnt tell them because they would think it would there fault. For teenagers it is the hardest form them, because they know when they are fighting and know that it isnt normal for them to do this. Then things escalade and their parents get a divorce and they feel betrayed by both their parents. Many stories I read said that some teenagers have trust issues with people and start experimenting in sex, drugs, and alcohol. They feel like it is there

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fault also but in all the cases it had nothing to do with the kids. Laura Clark wrote an article about how she handled her divorce and how her family of teenage kids took it and how they reacted. She said both her husband and her sat down their kids explained everything that had been happening and why they were getting a divorce and told them it was the kids fault. Them they asked the kids if they had any questions. She said the answered questions for forty-five minutes and she also said that it worked even though they still took it hard but who isnt going to take it hard. Also kids who go through a divorce have a 90% success rate with their marriage working. Divorce is a terrible thing but it is a part of life for a lot of people the thing is the divorce rate is going down. We just need to make sure that it isnt the kids fault and help them understand that. Divorce can really effect a kid and it is the parents job to make sure they know why and to help them if they are going through a rough situation after the divorce for the kid.

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Work Cited Page Utz, Rebecca. Parental Divorce Among Young and Adult Children. A Long Term Quantitative Analysis of Mental Health and Family Solidariy. 53.4 (2012): 247-266. Academic Search Premier. Web. Ivanova, Katya, Melinda Mills, and Rene Veenstra. The Initiation of Dating in Adolescence. The Effect of Parental Divorce. The Trails Study. 21.4 (2011): 769-775. Academic Search Premier. Web. A Marriage Ends, But A Family Does Not. Tampa Bay Times [Tampa Bay] 1 Feb. 2013: 3+. Print. Moses, Marlene. Helping Children Endure Divorce. 49.1 (2013): 34-38. Academic Search Premier. Web. 42% of Marriage End in Divorce. Belfast Telegraph Online. N.p. 20 Dec. 2012. Web. 5 Mar. 2013. Clark, Laura. Children of Divorce Do Poorly at School. Daily Mail 19 Jan. 2013: 19+. Newspaper Source Plus. Web.