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How Your Divorce Impacts Your
Children
If you were divorced a while ago, you may only now
be seeing the results. Ten years after their
parents’ divorce, young women who are now
nineteen to twenty-three are afraid of intimacy
with a male, afraid of betrayal, and/or afraid of
losing love, says clinical psychologist Clay
Tucker-Ladd. Young men the same age have many of
the same issues. Ten years after the divorce, 40
percent of them are drifting in school, and
don’t have any real sense of self-direction.
There’s a pretty good chance that you’re
still suffering too. According to
Tucker-Ladd’s research, 30 to 50 percent of
divorced couples are still bitter after the divorce
ten years after the fact.
Your divorce, whether it happened a while ago or
right now, is going to have a big impact on your
relationships with your adult children. Later in
life, divorced fathers get less care from and are
less likely to live with an adult child, according
to a study conducted by Barbara Steinberg Schone,
Ph.D., of the Agency for Health Care Policy and
Research, and Liliana Pezzin, Ph.D., of the Johns
Hopkins University School of Medicine.
If you thought that getting remarried would make
things better, you’d be wrong. Remarried
parents get less care from their children—and
provide less cash assistance to them—than
parents who are either in intact marriages or
haven’t remarried, according to Schone and
Pezzin.
For stepfathers there’s an interesting
double standard. Although dads’ ties with
their step kids are not typically as strong as they
are with their biological children, adult children
get along better with stepfathers than with
stepmothers, according to Harvard sociologist
Constance Ahrons. About half of adult children
whose mothers had remarried consider their
stepfathers parents and were happy about the new
marriage. But only about a third of adult kids
whose fathers had remarried liked the idea of
having a stepmother and considered her a
parent.
If you think about this, it actually makes
sense. In cases of divorce, more mothers get
custody. That means that when Mom remarries, the
kids have a chance to establish a good relationship
with their new stepfather. Since they don’t
spend as much time with their biological father,
it’s natural that the kids wouldn’t bond
nearly as well with his new wife.
©2007, Armin Brott
* * *
It's clear that most American children suffer
too much mother and too little father. - Gloria
Steinem
A
nationally recognized parenting expert, Armin Brott
is the author of Blueprint
for Men's Health: A guide to a health
lifestyle,
The
Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for
Dads-to-Be;
The
New Father: A Dad's Guide to the First
Year, A
Dad's Guide to the Toddler
Years, Throwaway
Dads, The
Single Father: A Dad's Guide to Parenting without a
Partner and Father for
Life. He has written on parenting and fatherhood
for the New York Times Magazine, The
Washington Post, Newsweek and dozens of
other periodicals. He also hosts “Positive
Parenting”, a nationally distributed, weekly
talk show, and lives with his family in Oakland,
California. Visit Armin at www.mrdad.com
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