How Your Divorce Impacts Your Children

By Armin Brott

Author of Father for Life

If you were divorced a while ago, you may only now be seeing the results. Ten years after their parents' divorce, young women who are now nineteen to twenty-three are afraid of intimacy with a male, afraid of betrayal, and/or afraid of losing love, says clinical psychologist Clay Tucker-Ladd. Young men the same age have many of the same issues. Ten years after the divorce, 40 percent of them are drifting in school, and don't have any real sense of self-direction. There's a pretty good chance that you're still suffering too. According to Tucker-Ladd's research, 30 to 50 percent of divorced couples are still bitter after the divorce ten years after the fact.

Your divorce, whether it happened a while ago or right now, is going to have a big impact on your relationships with your adult children. Later in life, divorced fathers get less care from and are less likely to live with an adult child, according to a study conducted by Barbara Steinberg Schone, Ph.D., of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and Liliana Pezzin, Ph.D., of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

If you thought that getting remarried would make things better, you'd be wrong. Remarried parents get less care from their children—and provide less cash assistance to them—than parents who are either in intact marriages or haven't remarried, according to Schone and Pezzin.

For stepfathers there's an interesting double standard. Although dads' ties with their step kids are not typically as strong as they are with their biological children, adult children get along better with stepfathers than with stepmothers, according to Harvard sociologist Constance Ahrons. About half of adult children whose mothers had remarried consider their stepfathers parents and were happy about the new marriage. But only about a third of adult kids whose fathers had remarried liked the idea of having a stepmother and considered her a parent.

If you think about this, it actually makes sense. In cases of divorce, more mothers get custody. That means that when Mom remarries, the kids have a chance to establish a good relationship with their new stepfather. Since they don't spend as much time with their biological father, it's natural that the kids wouldn't bond nearly as well with his new wife.

A nationally recognized parenting expert, Armin Brott is the author of The New Father: A Dad’s Guide to the First Year, Father for Life, The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be; A Dad’s Guide to the Toddler Years, Throwaway Dads, and The Single Father: A Dad’s Guide to Parenting without a Partner. He has written on parenting and fatherhood for the New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, Newsweek and dozens of other periodicals. He also hosts “Positive Parenting”, a nationally distributed, weekly talk show, and lives with his family in Oakland, California. Visit Armin at www.mrdad.com.

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