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Children Affected by Low-Conflict Divorce

 Posted on March 09, 2013 in Divorce

There are several different aspects of divorce that have to be considered if divorce is on the table, but the most complicated issues deal with how the split will affect children if the divorcees are parents. Conventional wisdom is that divorce has the potential to ruin a child’s understanding of intimacy, and can leave him or her feeling lost, or without anchor. More recent studies show that if the marriage was wrought with conflict, divorce may actually be better for the kids. According to Psychology Today, this is more truth than the former. University of Nebraska sociologist Paul Amato has recently released a study in which he followed 2,000 families for nearly two decades. “If there has been lots of conflict in the marriage, the children actually do better if there is a divorce,” he told Psychology Today. Yet the hardest hit in a divorce, according to Amato and reported in the magazine, “are the children of marriages in which there were not high levels of hostility before a break-up. The husband and wife just didn’t drift along and the kids don’t notice anything’s missing.” For these kids, the dissolution of the marriage, rendering them adrift between two homes, floating, per-se, between both parents, is an unwelcome disturbance rather than a culmination of an already-disturbed childhood. Amato believes that “low-conflict divorce undermines kids’ sense of trust and causes them great psychological distress as they grow older.” It’s these kids, not all children of divorce, who have difficulty forming trusting relationships later in life, and are “particularly unhappy” as adults. It’s likely because, for the child, there was nothing visibly wrong. Children, of course, are unable to grasp the lower frequency wavelengths of their parents’ relationships, and so are unable to see how divorce could have been better for their parents if they weren’t visibly unhappy. Bringing a third party into a divorce, in the way of a qualified attorney, can help a family to sort out the difficult situations such as this. Don’t go through it alone. Contact a dedicated Chicago-area family law attorney today. Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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