When divorce comes into the picture and children are involved, it’s only natural that that children will have a lot of questions and be wrestling with a lot of mixed feelings. And that’s especially true because … they’re children! They don’t have the same reasoning skills as adults. Let’s face it:
“The children of divorce are handed a really big job. When parents are married, it’s their job to do the hard work of making sense of your different values, your different beliefs, your different backgrounds. When they get divorced that job doesn’t go away, it just gets handed to their child instead, who is 4 or 8 or 12 years old. Their child is and always will be, throughout their childhood, looking to their mom and dad as the first and most important role models for their own moral and spiritual formation.
“The child is wrestling with the differences that the child sees in each of their worlds. And the conflict that used to be between the parents has now gotten transferred to the child’s inner life. And it’s within the child’s own life in a very lonely, overwhelming way that the child is trying to confront these big questions. It’s the distinctive experience of the child of divorce.” (Elizabeth Marquardt, The Emotional Hurdles of Living Through a Divorce Broadcast Date: 10/24/06 - This FamilyLife Today Transcript is located at: http://www.familylife.com/fltoday/default.asp?id=8838
If you are considering divorce and you want to know what some of the questions are that they’ll be wrestling with, or maybe you’re trying to help a child of divorce, there is an article written by Angela Elwell Hunt, which is posted on the Today’s Christian Magazine web site, that may give you some great insight.
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1 comment so far ↓
1 Susan // Nov 16, 2007 at 12:15 pm
(USA) What alot of people don’t realize is that children don’t need to be small to suffer from the effects of divorce. It is difficult on older children also, even if those children are in their 20’s. To watch their parents break apart a home that they knew is heartwrenching. We need to be aware that all children, even we in our 50’s, suffer from divorce.
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