Joseph Nowinski, Ph.D.: Helping Children Survive Divorce: Talking to Children About Divorce

In my first blog in this series I described research which shows that divorce is not inevitably damaging to children. Indeed, ongoing research continues to support the contention that, overall, children from divorced families are not significantly worse off, psychologically, than their peers from intact families. That said, it is also true that children of divorce express feelings of distress and are bothered by bad memories for years after their parents' divorce.

Researchers who surveyed college students whose parents had divorced ten years earlier, as well as a group of non-college same-age children of divorce, found that these young men and women continued to report significant feelings of distress related to the divorce. Most often cited was the relative loss of their relationships with their fathers, along with lingering distress associated with intense and ongoing parental conflict.

via Joseph Nowinski, Ph.D.: Helping Children Survive Divorce: Talking to Children About Divorce.