Divorce and Children Issue Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2000 words

Divorce and Children Issue - Essay Example There is a significant consensus among academic publications that divorce as an event has a net negative effect on children’s experience of wellbeing, but different authors differ significantly as to the reasons why such differences might exist and the long term psychological impact on children of divorce. Public opinion, however, is nearly unanimous in believing that divorce is damaging for children, though some argue that the long term impact might be better. In interviews, people generally state ideas that they have consumed from media (both news and popular) about divorce – essentially saying that the odds are that divorce will be harmful, but significant steps can be taken to reduce or mitigate that harm. Overall, the sources are in remarkable agreement about the effect of divorce on children of divorce. ... gely tried to make sense out of former research: â€Å"we know that adults and children from divorced families, as a group, score lower than their counterparts in married-couple families on a variety of indicators of wellbeing.† This essentially mirrors statements made in each of the other articles; in fact, the other two articles treat the idea that damage is done during the process of divorce as a known fact, for instance McGuiness simply quipping that â€Å"obviously, divorce reverberates in a child’s life for many years,† (2006, 20), and stating that the fundamental â€Å"truth† is that â€Å"marriage offers substantial benefits to children† (McGuiness, 2006, pg. 17). Hetherington’s research also largely concurred, indicating that almost any measure of wellbeing was worse amongst children of divorce than children who were not from divorced households. These researchers differed significantly, however, in their interpretation of why childr en of divorce performed worse than ones who marry. Though each researcher made reference to the tempting notion that there was some sort of selection bias in play (IE that children of divorce were less happy because the family situation of parents who decide to get divorced is likely to have problems that filter down to affecting the child), none of the researches were convinced that this process amounted to the primary reason for the apparent negative impact of divorce. Amato (2000, pg. 1287) even, in his survey of recent research, found that when largely controlling for variables such as family situation and so forth, divorce itself seemed to be problematic, that is that two children in exactly the same circumstance would have differing levels of success based on whether or not their parents were married. Given that selection