Being a stepparent for the second time and watching the struggles of my stepsons has really made me think about the effect divorce has on children and the carelessness with which people separate. The children are forever torn between two people who live apart. They rarely have both parents in the same place at the same time so are forever missing one parent.
Even if you take away any arguing on the part of the divorced parents, being bounced between two households is hard. One of my stepchildren has confessed to me that a secret wish is for the parents to remarry. Regardless of the likelihood of such an event, they wish for it. They want to be able to love both parents without feeling disloyal. They want to spend time with both parents at the same time.
Obviously, if my husband and his ex-wife had not gotten divorced, he and I would not be together. I am incredibly in love with him and look forward to a life together. I am glad we found each other, but that does not diminish the effect divorce had and will continue to have on his children.
I decided to do a little research on the lasting effects of divorce according to experts.
A caveat here - I think marriage is hard. I’ve been divorced. I know that people, me included, get married with a romanticized view of marriage and the reality is very different, sometimes the reality of WHO you’ve married only sinks in once the rose colored glasses come off. And our current culture doesn’t value marriage the way it once did. So I am not trying to hold myself up as a judge over anyone, but I think if people really understood how much divorce truly affects children, they might think twice before divorcing or perhaps even getting married. It might have given me pause in my younger years. Maybe if people really grasped that the children are better off if the parents stay together in all but the most abusive situations, perhaps more parents would try to work it out.
Now, I am not in favor of staying married in an abusive situation or one in which a partner has been unfaithful; however, marriages can heal from both of these things if both partners are willing to work at it. People today in general need to take marriage more seriously from the start and need to be more committed to making it work.
Some of the research I found showed that divorce has a lasting negative effect on the children – forever! 20-25% of post divorce children were considered troubled adults when measured against a list of psychiatric disorders while adult children of intact families only had a 10% occurrence. The researcher, Hetherington said, “Now, that two-fold increase is not to be taken lightly. It’s larger than the association between smoking and cancer.” (Hetherington 2002, p. D6) Everyone knows smoking causes cancer. We have laws that protect advertising cigarettes to children due to this fact. We have warning labels on the sides of packages and on all advertising. Smoking is illegal in most public places, on television ads and even outdoors in some areas. But children have no protection from divorce.
According to a 25 year study by Wallerstein and Lewis, ALL the post divorce children to a certain extent reached a conclusion that “personal relationships are unreliable,” failing to trust even the closest of family relationships. Even when the parents had positive second marriages, less than ten percent of the children whose parents had found stable new marriages felt secure and welcome in the new family unit.
That statistic makes me realize that no matter how well I try to parent the boys now, they are going to struggle with feeling loved and welcome in my home. They are going to be suspicious. If parents can leave, what would make a stepparent stay? That lack of trust kind of explains a lot of defensive argumentative behavior I have seen from several of my stepchildren over the years. It also makes me want to call them right now just for a verbal hug. I feel like a failure. After losing the children I had so lovingly raised in my last marriage, I have struggled with getting close to the boys. I am afraid to love them too much because they have a mother and I am afraid I would get so emotionally invested in them that I would struggle with letting them go. I learned the hard way that, no matter how much I love them and how well I try to “parent” them, they aren’t my children at the end of the day.
But I am responsible for who I am for them and with them while they are in my home. I need to make a larger effort to help them feel loved, welcome and secure in our home and with our relationship. If they, even on a subconscious level, fear losing relationships, I need to make sure they understand that I will always be available to them no matter what. I will say that my older stepchildren from my previous marriage are both in contact with me. We talk once in awhile, visit when possible (a few times a year) and email and Facebook often.
My take away from this tonight is to make a bigger effort to be good and understanding when the boys visit and to work very hard at making my marriage work. We’re doing OK so far, but we’re not quite five years in, nearly seven since we met. Hopefully we have a long way to go.
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