Parents who are in the midst of a divorce might want to protect their children from details tied to the breakup, such as parenting arrangements. But they might be doing more harm than good.
Javad Alizadeh/Wikimedia Commons/GNU Free Documentation License
A survey of 61 children and adolescents who recently had gone through their parents’ divorce suggested that many want a say in how the divorce will affect them, according to a report broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).
The parents’ actions are benevolent in their intention, but they “may be associated with the experience of harm on the part of children and young people where their agency and capacity to participate in decision making that affects them isn’t acknowledged and accommodated,” said study lead Rachel Carson, PhD, of the Australian Institute of Family Studies, in an interview.
To conduct the survey, the research team conducted interviews with the children and adolescents, aged 10-17 years. They also interviewed 47 parents of those children.
Most of the children and adolescents interviewed said they felt isolated from their parents’ divorce, with little or no influence on the process. The ABC report included several quotations from the interviewees, including “Phoebe,” who was 15 years old at the time of the survey.
“When a kid goes through a divorce, a lot of the time the adults become very immature, so the children grow up a lot quicker,” Phoebe said.
The survey concluded that a “child-inclusive approach be adopted incorporating the features of effective professional practice. ...A commitment to this approach would importantly be a step towards meeting the loud and clear calls from participating children and young people to ‘give children a bigger voice, more of the time.’ ”
Click here to listen to the ABC story.