Divorce and Children – The Right Tips How and What to Tell Your Children about Divorce
The rate of divorce has been slowly declining since that peak. At that time, the rate of divorce was about 5 per 1,000 women.
The divorce rate has been climbing in every industrialized country in the world. There are two significant factors affecting the rising divorce rate in the United States and elsewhere:
- men and women are less in need of each other for economic survival, and
- gains made in birth control allow men and women to separate sexual activity from having children.
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A variety of factors are producing the current leveling off of the divorce rate.
Robert Hughes: It is important to note that while divorce increases children's risk for a variety of problems, not all children who experience divorce have problems.
Robert Hughes is an Associate Professor and Extension Specialist in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Ohio State University. For the past 20 years, he has conducted educational programs in family relations for family life professionals, and for family members themselves, with a primary emphasis on families at risk, family stress, and single parenting.
Children from divorced families are more likely to have academic problems. In adolescence and young adulthood, they are more likely to have some difficulty forming intimate relationships and establishing independence from their families.
Whether you use children's grades, standardized test scores, or dropout rates, children whose parents divorce generally have poorer scores. Importantly, children's actual performance on tests consistently shows this difference, but results based on teacher or parent reports are less likely to show this difference. School success has long-term implications for children's success in life, and so it is important to find ways to support children from divorced families.
