The child’s relationship with each parent is changed by the divorce. In the short-term, the parent is likely to experience new burdens and feelings of guilt, anger, or sadness that may disrupt parenting skills and family routines. Contact with the noncustodial parent may decline greatly. Parents may be perceived by their children as being unaware of the child’s distress around the time of the divorce. Pediatricians can help parents understand things they can do that will be reassuring to the child. Maintaining contact with both parents, seeing where the noncustodial parent is living, and, in particular, maintaining familiar routines are comforting to the child in the midst of the turmoil of a separation and divorce. The child should attend school and continue to have opportunities to interact with friends. Given the parents’ distress, assistance from the extended family can be helpful, but these family members may not offer to help for fear of “interfering.” It may be helpful for pediatricians to encourage parents to ask for this assistance. Pediatricians should look for maladaptive coping responses. Some parents may respond to their increased burdens and distress by treating their children as friends with whom they share their distress. Alternatively they may place excessive responsibilities on the child or leave the child unsupervised for longer periods of time. Responses such as these increase the chance that the child will develop behavioral or emotional problems.
Reaction to Divorce at Different Ages
The child’s reaction to the divorce is influenced by the child’s age and developmental level. Although infants do not react directly to the divorce, they require special considerations in relation to custody and visitation because infants need a stable daily routine and regular contact with a primary caregiver to develop secure attachment. Separations from a primary caregiver should be brief. Increased infant irritability or listlessness and withdrawal may be signs of distress for an infant. Preschool children are characterized by having magical beliefs about cause and effects and an egocentric view of the world. They may believe that something they did caused the divorce, leading them to be particularly upset. They may engage in unusual behaviors that they believe will bring the parents back together again. At this age, parents need to deliver a clear message that the divorce was related to disagreements between the parents, that nothing the child did caused the divorce, and that nothing the child could do would bring the parents back together again. Preschool children may reason that if the parents left each other they also might leave the child. To counteract this fear of abandonment, children may need to be reassured that although parents separated, they will not abandon the child and that the child’s relationship with both parents will endure.
School-age children have a concrete understanding of cause and effect; if something bad happened, they understand that something caused it to happen. However they are not likely to understand fully the subtleties of parental conflict or the idea that multiple factors contribute to a conflict. Children at this age may still worry that something they did caused the divorce. They may express more anger than younger children and often feel rejected. Many young school-age children worry about what will happen to one or both parents. School performance often deteriorates. Older elementary school–age children may believe that one parent was wronged by the other. This belief, in conjunction with their concrete understanding of cause and effect, allows children to be easily co-opted by one parent to take sides against the other. Parents need to understand this vulnerability and resist the temptation to support their child in taking sides.
Adolescents may respond to the divorce by acting out, becoming depressed, or experiencing somatic symptoms. Adolescents are developing a sense of autonomy, a sense of morality, and the capacity for intimacy, and divorce may lead them to question previously held beliefs. They may be concerned about what the divorce means for their future and whether they too will experience marital failure. Questioning of previous beliefs in conjunction with decreased supervision may set the stage for risk-taking behaviors, such as truancy, sexual behaviors, and alcohol or drug use.
Outcome of Divorce