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Ava Fulker
English Comp. 1201
Debra Blouch
03/21/2021
Literature Review
Divorce is one of the worst things that could occur in a young child’s life. Getting to
witness the breaking up of your two parents that you thought were going to be together forever
can be one of the most traumatic events in a child’s mind. Could the effects of this experience be
large enough to cause mental health issues? When I was very young, I had a firsthand experience
with divorce. All I would hear was yelling and negative words coming out of my parent mouths
whenever they were together. Even after they were officially done and separated there was still
fighting over whether my father would get to see his children or if my mother was going to keep
us. I believe that I do have some issues that had bloomed throughout my younger years leading
into my early teens. Now some of them may be from other traumatic experiences, but it leads me
to think that the main source of my issues are from my mother and father getting divorced. Now
I find myself questioning, how does divorce effects children’s mental health?
When it comes to researching this question, I came across several reliable sources.
Throughout reading these sources I noticed that they all had the same general idea, that parental
divorce does have an effect on children’s mental state. Things such as depression, loneliness,
fear, confusion, and more are present in the lives post-divorce.
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In the Social Indicators Research paper “The Casual Effects of Parental Divorce and
Parental Temporary Separation on Children’s Cognitive Abilities and Psychological Well-Being
According to Parental Relationship Quality” authors Anna Garriga and Fulvia Pennoni write
about their outcome of their studies on the effects of parental divorce on children’s well-being.
The main result of their research is “Children experiencing parental temporary separation or
parental divorce shows lightly more psychological problems and lower scores for cognitive
development with respect to children with stable family.” (A. Garriga, F. Pennoni) Meaning that
children who do experience this event may gain conduct, hyperactive, internalizing, peer, pro-
social, vocabulary, pattern, and picture problems. Similar result were found in a separate study
conducted in South Nigeria.
In the “Analytical Study of Causes and Effects of Divorce as Perceived by Students in
South South Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria” authors Ugo C. Okolie, Okwu A. Onyema, and Ugo
S. Basey state that “Children of divorced couples generally fare worse in terms of emotional,
psychological and educational outcomes, they feel anger, fear, depression, loneliness, and even
guilt.” (C. Okolie, A. Onyema, S. Basey) The authors come to a conclusion that divorce has a
negative effect on children as a whole. Mainly targeting divorce couples with children, the main
idea of this paper is that divorce has an effect on the psychological state of children involve with
divorce.
Jennie E. Brand, Ravaris Moore, Xi Song, and Yu Xie in “Parental Divorce in Not
Uniformly Disruptive to Children’s Educational Attainment” write about how the effects of
divorce aren’t always the same in every divorce child’s life. “While parental divorce is generally
associated with unfavorable outcomes for children, it does not follow that every divorce is
equally bad for the children affected.” (E. Brand, Moore, Xie) The purpose of the article is to
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address the impact of parental divorce on a child and how educational attainment is unlikely the
result of divorce. The article “The Impact of Family Structure on the Health of Children: Effects
of Divorce” by Jane Anderson, shares the same idea that not all divorces share the same
outcomes. Stated in article “Each child and each family are obviously unique, with different
strengths and weaknesses, different personalities and temperaments, and varying degrees of
social, emotional, and economic resources, as well as differing family situations prior divorce.”
(Anderson) While these two articles have some similarities, they also have some differences. In
Anderson’s article she states that negative consequences do fall on children, but in Brand,
Moore, and Xie’s article they disagree with that statement.
Through these sources I could come up with some what of an answer to my research
question. While they all don’t have the same idea, they share similarities that are almost exactly
the same. Now, issues that surface post-divorce may have come from a different experience it
seems that in the articles and studies divorce is the main source of the issues. In conclusion
divorce has a negative effect on children’s mental health.
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Work Cited
Anderson, Jane. “The Impact of Family Structure on the Health of Children: Effects of Divorce.”
The Linacre Quarterly, Maney Publishing, Nov. 2014,
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4240051/. Accessed on 7 March 2021.
Brand, Jennie E., et al. “Parental Divorce Is Not Uniformly Disruptive to Children's Educational
Attainment.” PNAS, National Academy of Sciences, 9 Apr. 2019
www.pnas.org/content/116/15/7266. Accessed on 7 March 2021.
Don’t Divorce Me! Kids’ Rules for Parents on Divorce. Directed by Amy Schatz,
HBO, 2012.
Garriga, Anna, and Fulvia Pennoni. “The Casual Effects of Parental Divorce and Parental
Temporary Separation on Children’s Cognitive Abilities and Psychological Well-Being
According to Parental Relationship Quality.” Social Indicators Research: An
International and Interdisciplinary Journal for Quality-of-Life Measurement, 2020, p.
1. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1007/s11205-020-02428-2.
OKOLIE, Ugo C., et al. “Analytical Study of Causes and Effects of Divorce as Perceived by
Students in South Geopolitical Zone of Nigeria.” Balkan Social Science Review, vol. 15,
no. 15. Jan 2020, pp. 25-46 EBSCOhost, Accessed on 3 March 2021
Root, Andrew. The Children of Divorce: The loss of family as the loss of being. Brazos, 2010
