How Divorce Can Affect Youths?
There are many ways how a divorce could affect the child in the family negatively!
- Declines in self-esteem (Amato, 2001).
Parents, the parential home, the unconditional love between the parents is something children belief in. Your break-up does damage the self confidence of your children. Especially children between 5 and 10 years old are vulnerable. They often think they caused the divorce by behaving not as expected.
In the beginning, many children think the worlds ends when their parents announce the divorce.
Children also wonder what their friends think of it Will my class mates see me as a looser because of the divorce?
- Emotional Pain and Suffering
A divorce hurts all the family members, including the children. Youths might not understand what is happening, but the feel the loss of one of the parents not being around.
Pain however, is something that goes away. The memories stay, but memories are not always on your mind. They only pop up when you think about it. Some people cannot let go negative feelings and emotions and keep them alive. By doing so, they keep on feeling mistreated, misguided and pitiful. These feelings prevent them from focussing on positive things and on a new future. Usually, if they become aware of the vicious circle they are in, or when somebody else makes it clear to them, the suffering stops.
This is why we created programmes to help youths to be freed from the struggles that they are facing in a divorce family