Jessica Jaramillo

Padgett
English 102 -125
16 February 2016
How Does Divorce Affect Children Emotionally?
Being a child of divorce, I have always been curious to see if the effects of my parents
misfortune was likewise for other divorced children. For myself, I believe every case of
divorce within families is unique, thus researchers cannot make generalized statements
predicting the effects for each and every family and child. Ever since I was five years old, my
parents have been divorced; therefore, I have never experienced what it was like to be a part of a
traditional family style. From my perspective, I never looked at divorce in a negative light, it just
was. Personally, I believe that you can learn from every downfall in life and with divorce being
an immense one, children can either take away a lot of knowledge and grow or let divorce define
them and put limitations to their capabilities in life. However, there is an immense amount of
emotion that comes from divorce. These emotions tend to be overlooked by researchers as they
focus mainly on measureable effects such as test scores and or personal characteristics that are
altered by divorce. Discovering the leading trends within divorce amongst children also ties into
how society itself is evolving and how social norms are being remolded and formed. As far as
qualifications go, experiencing divorce first hand provides a certain perspective to the point that I
am trying to make, which is, that the effects of divorce towards children can be far deeper than
the visible effects.
The first article speaks mainly to childrens adjustment with divorce and how it effects
there growth and development in school, socially, and within relationships. This article presents a
lot of data, facts and statistics such as 35% of children whose parents divorce have worse

relationships with their fathers than do children whose parents stay together. This statistic
relates to the emotional side effects of divorce and the author also makes it clear that every case
of divorce is different and unique in its own way. This article makes a point to talk about how
researchers should specialize in more specific situations such as grades in school of divorced
children vs. non-divorced children. Morally, the author realizes that not every child operates the
same post-divorce which is an important value to have and direct to audiences of his work. As far
as credibility and bias go, this publication was produced on behalf of the Association for
Psychological Science and was a JSTOR database article. The author Jennifer E. Lansford has a
PhD and is a professor at Duke who specializes in human growth and development, divorce
being one subgroup.
My second article touches on the developmental patterns and age correlation within the
effects of divorce. The author presences her claims in sections of ages as divorce effects each age
rage differently. This aspect also relates to the point where age can affect the emotional stability
for children. For instance, infants for instance tend to cry, feel the need to be held and tend to be
susceptible to acute separation anxiety. This article talks about the role of the nurse and how
divorce can actually cause symptoms of ailments and illnesses. With nurses knowing the growing
stages of the effects of divorce, they can more easily detect the early stages and develop
treatment plans and precautions to the side effects. Overall having a better knowledge of the time
frames and effects of divorce helps nurses, parents, and guardians better alleviate the stress of
divorce. To ensure the credibility in my source I searched for this article in an academically
accredited database, EBSCOhost. I wanted to make sure part of my information was relevant in
time so this source being from July 1st, 2014 ensure a sense of relevance and fresh knowledge on
the topic.

For my third article, I wanted to look further into the emotional effects of stable
marriages vs unstable. This article analyzes marital characteristics effect on children, claiming
the advantages of marriage is the sum of what all marriages entail including income, parents
mental and physical health, parenting quality and social networks. If a persons home life was
more stable financially, than would the child be better of emotionally? One main aspect of this
article is that it makes it clear that in order to have a stable and healthy relationship as a child,
ones parents must be able to hold themselves to the same regard and stability both financially,
physically, and mentally. Another point this article makes an effort to bring out, is the fact that
same sex marriage hold no greater detriment on childrens wellbeing compared to heterogeneous
marriages. Would a homogeneous marriage produced more emotionally stable children? If so
why? Published by Princeton University, a reputable source of knowledge, this academically
credible article holds very little bias. One of the authors, Sara McLanahan, is an American
sociologist who received her PhD from University of Texas and was previously a professor at the
University of Wisconsin which speaks volumes on her credibility. Finding my article from
JSTOR also helped me filter out any paid-for articles that authors and publishers pay for people
to see as oppose to readers needing to pay to read them.
Overall, I feel divorce is a growing and very researchable topic which can be further
researched on a deeper level emotionally. Human development alone is a highly popular topic to
discuss and divorce being not just one event, but a process that which children are effected from
provides a great deal of information to do research on. When looking for my sources, I wanted to
gather as many sides as possible and I felt it was imported to hear and be open-minded when
reading them. Going into the research process I was very adamant that divorce is not solely
negative but looking into the researched I soon realized that the emotional bearings that come

along with divorce effect many aspects of a childs life. After researching, it is clear that divorce
does have a huge effect on people and I never really knew how detrimental it could really be. As
far as revision of my initial inquiry I feel that it stands fine how it is now.

Work Cited
Lansford, Jennifer E.. Parental Divorce and Children's Adjustment. Perspectives on
Psychological Science 4.2 (2009): 140152. Web...
McLanahan, Sara, and Isabel Sawhill. Marriage and Child Wellbeing Revisited: Introducing the
Issue. The Future of Children 25.2 (2015): 39. Web...
Oppawsky, Jolene. "The Nurse Sees It First The Effects Of Parental Divorce On Children
And Adolescents." Annals Of Psychotherapy & Integrative Health (2014): 1-8. Academic
Search Complete. Web. 8 Feb. 2016.