Divorce and Its Effects on Child Behavior

During the 1960s in United States, nearly 90 percent of the children reached the age of maturity while living with their biological parents as compare to only 40 percent today (Wallerstein, & Kelly, 1979). The major reasons for this change include the dramatic increase in the divorce rate which itself caused by many factors and increased society acceptance of single parent’s childbearing by the society and growing trends in cohabitation rather than marriage. More than 45 percent of the marriages during the 1990s ended in divorce in which affected millions of children (Altenhofen, 2010). Similar the divorce rate, the nature and effects of this event of family separation has also changed in the last 3 decades. Many studies suggest that divorce is not act which could be studies or analyzed in separation, rather the act is just a single phase of a series of long family transitions with the great potential to affect the family and children (Kim, 2011). Living in an intact family before divorce and living with a single parent have different effect on the process of child behavior. The high divorce rates and being raised by a single parent has resulted in continuously deteriorating behavior of the child who suffered from the parents’ divorce. The changing nature and rate divorce in the recent times, resulted in the child behavior getting worse as compare to the behavior of children affected from divorce some time before. This is mainly due to recent changes in laws regarding divorce, which enabled the separating couple going through the legalities of divorce more quickly now than before (Potter, 2010). This paper attempts to validate the same assertion that behavior of children is worse now than it was ten years ago. Divorce is truly a major loss for a child. Not all the children, however, react in the same manner to their parents’ separation. Rather child’s reaction to the tragic event mainlydepends upon the way he or she perceives the act (Altenhofen,

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