The Impact of Divorce on Children

Stephane Lapeine

PSYC 210

Liberty University

Abstract

There is an enormous amount of research on the effects of divorce on children. All of these researchers point to the same fact: children suffer when parents separate. In the past few decades, the rates of marriage have been declining and the divorce rates have remained steady. This means that many families are continuing to break up. Unfortunately, the issue of divorce has many negative effects on children. For children, divorce is a harrowing experience full of stress, sadness, and confusion. Therefore, it is important to know the effects that divorce has on children. This paper will discuss the impact of divorce on children. The first section of the paper will briefly summarize the issue of divorce. The next section will highlight the effects of divorce on children including, but not limited to, drug abuse, poor social skills, susceptibility to illness, increased chances of dropping out of school, and early death. The last section of the paper will summarize and restate the points earlier discussed.

You are off to a solid start with your abstract. You have highlighted some key ideas about the impact of divorce on children. I am looking forward to reading your final paper and seeing the research you cover. Keep in mind that the abstract is a brief, comprehensive summary of the factual content of your paper. It is best to include the four or five most important concepts and/or implications that the reader can expect to see in the paper. You may find you need to fine tune your abstract once you have actually written your Research Paper. Please note the few edits/comments I made.

Thank you! Keep up the great work!

The Impact of Divorce on Children

With the subject of divorce hardly becoming an exception anymore, the immediate effects of this issue is on children. Over the past few decades, the rate of marriage has been dipping and divorce rates becoming steady. Studies on the effects of divorce on children show worrying results. Generally, divorce places children at a greater risk of many problems. Some of the impacts include drug abuse and crime, poor social skills, susceptibility to sickness, increased chances of dropping out of school, and early death.

First, divorce places children at a risk of drug abuse. Because of the stigma associated with separation of parents, children start to engage in irresponsible behavior such as smoking, alcohol abuse, and crime. Secondly, divorce affects children’s social skills based on the fact that they are likely to suffer from stress, anxiety, and low self-esteem (Hansen, 2013). Therefore, children who are victims of divorce will be socially isolated and in most cases, will fall behind their peers in academic work.

Divorce also affects the health and wellbeing of children. Coupled with stress associated with divorce, children who are victims are vulnerable to a myriad of health complications because they lack proper adult supervision and a safe environment to grow up in (Hansen, 2013). There are also chances that children can drop out of school when parents’ divorce. This is because there is lack of parental support, supervision, and financial assistance to help such children. Since the conditions that children are brought up in when parents’ divorce are not conducive, the chances of early death are high.

Generally, divorce has long term emotional and psychological damage on children. The effects of divorce on children cannot be underestimated. These effects include drug abuse and crime, poor social skills, susceptibility to illness, increased chances of dropping out of school, and early death. If not provided with adequate support, such children will not achieve their goals and aspirations.

References

Hansen, L. (March 2013). 9 negative effects divorce reportedly has on children. The Week. Retrieved from http://theweek.com/article/index/242059/9-negative-effects-divorce-reportedly-has-on-children

I appreciate your effort on your reference page. You did a great job with Hanging indent format and double spacing. Although you listed one of the references you are planning to use, please note that this paper requires using 5 sources. This cost quite a number of points for this assignment. As noted above, 2 need to be articles from Scholarly, Professional Journals.

Please compare each source you use to examples on the following websites to perfect APA formatting:

HYPERLINK “http://www.apastyle.org” www.apastyle.org

HYPERLINK “http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01” http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/01

Thank you for your diligence on this assignment. I hope my comments are helpful as you complete your Research Paper. I look forward to reading it. Lydia Tchividjian