Does Divorce Run in the Family

Divorce can be a traumatic experience for everyone involved. It is natural for the spouses to feel bitter, angry, frustrated and cheated during the divorce process. Often, people feel so stressed because of all these emotions that they do not know how to deal with all the feelings at one point in time. If you think only the husband and the wife are most affected by divorce, you are mistaken.

During a divorce, children are the most affected of all the people involved in the divorce process. Children are extremely delicate and have fragile minds. It is not common for children to experience anything as stressful as a divorce. Therefore, no matter what, they can never be prepared for it. In addition, the trauma associated with divorce can be so huge that they may find it very hard to recover from it.

As an adult, you may have at least some experience of dealing with tough and stressful situations. However, children, in their innocent little world, cannot even think of ever facing the kind of stress and unhappiness that a divorce brings along with it. Therefore, the emotional and mental scars caused by divorce may take a very long time to fade away. In fact, recent studies have proved that the scars caused by parental divorce may never completely go away even when the child reaches adulthood.

Are Children of Divorce Likely to Divorce Their Own Partners When They Grow Up?

Recent studies have proved that divorce can have long-lasting negative consequences on the child’s mental health. Children have impressionable minds and they usually look up to their parents as their role models. When their role models display bitterness towards each other, have constant fights, and have issues of trust and commitment, the children too tend to imbibe these negative qualities from their parents.

Many children of divorce tend to have commitment issues; either they are commitment-phobic or they stop believing in the institution of marriage. In such cases, even when the children do end up getting married when they grow up, they are not able to fight the cycle of failed relationship that their parents displayed because they do not know any better.

Research has proved that girls tend to have problems with self-esteem and confidence when they grow up in a single-parent household. This is bound to have an impact on their choice of life partner; either they end up choosing someone who is extremely dominating or someone who is very submissive. Either ways, the marriage is bound to be a disaster because of the personality disorder.

Many researchers have called the pattern wherein children of divorce tend to divorce their own partners as the “intergenerational transmission of divorce” or the divorce cycle. In fact, recent studies have also proved that a couple may be twice as likely to divorce if even one of the spouses comes from a divorced family background than a couple with stable family history.

Researchers claim that the loss of a parent can have a huge impact on a child’s mental and physical well-being. While incidents of death are also responsible for loss of a parent, they do not affect the child in a negative way as divorce does. While children understand or come around to understanding death as a phenomenon, they are never able to understand divorce. All the innocent minds of the children know is that up until divorce, they had a family and now one of their parents is walking out on them.

Feelings of abandonment experienced by children may be very hard to get rid of. The children keep wondering if their parent is ever going to come back or not. Since their understanding of relationships becomes so unclear, they are not able to do justice to their marriages when they grow up and are likely to divorce their partners.

Lessons Learnt by Children From Parental Divorce

Divorce can be a very bitter time. Many parents engage in constant fights and name-calling during and even after the divorce. When children are exposed to such kind of an environment, it can leave deep scars on their innocent minds.

Since children tend to look up to their parents, they end up thinking that this sort of behaviour amongst husband and wife is acceptable and may inculcate the same behavioural patterns. Many children of divorce have issues related to commitment and trust.

Children from divorced families see their parents’ marriage fail and they lose confidence in the institution of marriage. Therefore, even when the children of divorce get married when they grow up, they cannot grow out of the scepticism they feel towards marriage. The negative outlook towards marriage breaks the marriage eventually.