Thursday, July 09, 2009

How Divorce Affects Children

I was happy to see that Time Magazine and the Today Show this morning devoted so much space to the subject of divorce. It has always flummoxed me that the principle unit of our society—the family is falling apart and yet it’s rarely a news story. While we have to strengthen marriage, making it more passionate, more romantic, and more intimate, we also have to focus on divorce. Today I spoke on the Today Show on how divorce affects teenagers. I was 8 years old when my parents divorced and it scarred me so deeply that I thought I would never recover; while I have been able to work through it over the years, it has in fact has left a lasting impact on the person I have become. It is the reason that I have endeavored so much in the field of human relationships, trying to figure out how to keep a man and woman happily under the same roof for the duration of their lives. I was always puzzled at how so many of my friends, whose parents were divorced, were neutral on the topic and actually quite happy that their parents did divorce, thinking they were better off. Now, how could it be that divorce doesn’t adversely affect children in general and teenagers in particular? Here is a list of the adverse affects of divorce on children:

1.              The people whose love is responsible for your very existence have now drifted apart, rendering a big question mark in your existence. You become cynical about life and you begin to believe that life is made up of pieces of a puzzle that don’t ultimately fit. You begin to question the whole notion of love; love is the glue that keeps a man and woman together, but you never saw it operate, so you begin to question if there is such a thing as life-long commitment.

2.              You become a caregiver to your parents instead of the other way around. Children and teenagers need parents to raise them, they need care. But when you witness your parents nursing such deep wounds as when they fight and argue and divorce, you feel the need to take care of them and to nurse them from their pain, which puts you in a very unnatural situation. You are almost like the adult in the home now.

3.              You become a yo-yo, having to go from household to household and never really knowing where home is.

4.              Your innocence is compromised. Children have natural attachments to parents, but now you have to be more diplomatic about what you feel toward each parent. You don’t want to hurt your mother by showing her you’re closer to your father, or vice versa. So now, you have to be very calculating in how you show affection because you realize that there are two warring parties and you’re somewhat of a pawn caught in the middle. Whenever a child loses his or her innocence, it’s a major loss.

5.              You now have to contend with all sorts of strangers coming into your life—your mother starts dating men, your father starts dating women, creating a strange situation for the child to be in. You don’t know how to relate to them. On the one hand you want to be accepting of them because you want to see your mother and your father happy. However, on the other hand, you’re not looking for a surrogate parent as you already have a mother and a father, placing you in a very strange situation.

6.              It undermines the discipline parents have for kids. So often when parents divorce, the children become their sole source of affection and nobody’s going to bite the hand that feeds them, or get tough with kids when we become dependent on those children for affection. So, in that way, it undermines the discipline in the home.

7.              It creates an environment for chaos. What used to be stable: the knowledge that there is a two parent home, is no longer so. The child is then forced to live amidst the chaos.

8.              It makes kids not rely on their parents to confide in them. Look, there are some people who perhaps never should have gotten married, but by and large, the way a child in general and a teenager in particular is going to judge their parents’ divorce is almost analogous to the way parents view their children. The children question why their parents were incapable of working out their differences, why they were relegated to arguing, fighting, and screaming at each other. When children see their parents in this way, they begin to question their judgment. They then choose to go to their friends for wisdom and advice because they hold some degree of anger toward their parents. And now it’s a situation where the blind are leading the blind, teenagers are doling out advice as opposed to their wiser, more experienced parents.

9.              Studies show that children of divorce have a 50% higher rate of divorce themselves, probably because of all the reasons I mentioned. This does not mean that people who are unhappy should stay together; marriage is not a prison sentence. However, divorce is not something that should be taken lightly and even when divorce is necessary, it’s a necessary evil.

I remember once that a friend of mine who was in an unhappy marriage was getting divorced. She called me up and told me that she got her divorced finalized and she was making a party and wanted me to come. I told her that I wouldn’t be able to attend, as I would never celebrate divorce. She then got very angry at me and told me that this would compromise our friendship as this was something she was happy about and I wasn’t showing that I was happy for her. I proceeded to tell her that there are 3 things in life: the good, the bad, and the necessary. Divorce is never good, it is usually bad, and it is sometimes necessary. It’s like war; you sometimes have to fight a war but it’s not something you celebrate. There’s no such thing as a good divorce. Often divorces are necessary, so if people are unhappy, we don’t force them to stay together, but we ought to know that divorce comes at a severe cost and because of that, we need to try to make marriages last.

During the presidential campaign last year, I advocated strongly that the major candidates should embrace, as part of their platform, making marriage counseling tax deductible as an incentive for married couples to get the help they need. Maybe now the time has come to actually implement that idea.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the best-selling author of ‘Ten Conversations You Need to Have with Your Children,‘ ‘Kosher Sex,‘ ‘The Kosher Sutra,‘ and many other books about relationships and child-rearing. http://www.shmuley.com