How does divorce affect children socially?

Answer 1

Briefly:

Divorced women are four times more likely to live below the poverty line. It is not uncommon for a man's standard of living to rise after a divorce, although the present recession is having a serious impact on both men and women.

Divorce impacts every aspect of a child's life. In many cases the parents are more concerned with fighting and competition and completely ignore its effect on the children. The family life disintegrates, if there ever was one, and the children now must spend time between two households, sharing them and their parents with a parade of new partners. There is never enough money, the quality of life diminishes, single parents face a high degree of stress and may not have much time to spend quality time with the children. Ignorant and unwilling-to-compromise parents exacerbate the situation. Child discipline often falls behind and the children may spend more time unattended. That can lead to long term damage in the situations where children act out as a way of expressing their anger and anxiety over their drastic change in circumstances. Problems of delinquency can develop. Depression is often a factor and often goes untreated. All these factors can lead to an inability to pay attention in school.

Women are still most often the custodial parent and fathers most often regain their single life style. The day to day care of the children falls to the mother. In many cases, she must now run a household (clean, prepare meals, shop, pay bill), care for the children (school, doctors appointments, arrange child care) and work outside the home, with no help from the other parent. The parent who must pay child support resents it and often falls behind somehow believing that they should not be required to continue to support their children financially since they are no longer married to the other parent. It is estimated that only half of child support ordered by courts is paid and only half of that is paid in full. The difficulty of actually collecting court ordered child support payments has a terrible impact of the quality of life for mothers and children. They do without.

It takes an extraordinary amount of work, self discipline, self education and self sacrifice to maintain a stable, well managed home life after divorce. The good thing is that it can be done.

Answer 2

Firstly it's important to realise that however unlikely this is to be true, they'll most probably blame themselves, and depending on how old the child is there is likely to be some thought along the lines of "they don't love each other any more, and they don't love me any more".

divorce can cause kids to become very emotional and easily distressed/angered over very small issues, because their worlds have been effectively turned upside down and it's out of their control, they often feel that minor problems are just too small and not worth dealing with because of the amount of stress they feel on a daily basis (why add more to it over a petty problem), it can also really destroy their self esteem and make them feel paranoid about near future relationships especially with adults.

there are other affects but this is from personal experience, so my experience may have been different from other peoples and I'm sure there are affects that I've missed out.

Answer 3

couples are getting divorced for the smallest reason possible, so that the children are suffering greatly.