How Divorce Affects Children

How Divorce Affects Children 2 Unfortunately divorce has become a common occurrence in children’s lives, both for young children and young adolescents. According to the American Psychological Association, the statistic of divorce in the United State has reached forty to fifty percent levels. Approximately half of the forty to fifty percent of divorced couples in the United States affect children under the age of eighteen.
Although, it is both psychological and painful for all children experiencing divorce of their parents, the effect is different between young children and young adolescents. You cannot compare which level of age group is affected more from the parents divorce because as a young child you are very dependent upon both parents to be there for security and support. The effect of a young adolescent is one of the more independent due to the fact that the young adolescent who is now a teenager becomes more distant from both parents and starts to develop a social life with friends. (Carl Pickhardt, 2011) The young adolescent feels since the parents were selfish in their divorce that they can now become selfish themselves.
Male children are affected more by the separation in terms of cognitive performance, where female children are affected more by the separation, which leads to having a very negative behavior towards their mother (Clarke – Stewart et all, 2000).
There is also a difference of psychological and social behavior between children of divorced families and intact families. The percentage of children that have these issues is between twenty and twenty five percent as compared to ten percent of children having social behavior from intact families (Kelly and Emory, 2003). Another glaring