How Divorce Affects Your Child

Along with producing many meditation CD/MP3’s, such as Meditations for Abundance and Love: Volume I Deserving and Volume II: Manifesting (available here at: http://bit.ly/meditat3), I have also written a best-selling book, The 7 Fatal Mistakes Divorced and Separated Parents Make: Strategies for Raising Healthy Children of Divorce and Conflict,  available in print or PDF  at inlovewithme.com/books,  or on Kindle through Amazon at http://amzn.to/TIRGz4. Individual chapters are also for sale on http://inlovewithme.com/books/e-book-chapters.

Here is an excerpt on how divorce affects your child:

Based on my experience working with families, I can tell you that I have seen that conflict before, during and after divorce creates pain for your child and will have a negative impact on them in some way. Your child will find some way to cope, which may result in very unhealthy choices and behaviors.

Studies have shown that boys and girls from divorced homes and conflict show a higher incidence of physical ailments, including asthma, stomachache and other stress relatedsymptoms. Parental conflict in the presence of children is also linked to psychological problems including: aggression, anxiety, depression, poor self-esteem, physical complaints and difficulty in school.

Another child quoted in Long and Forehand’s Making Divorce Easier on Your Child said:

“My parents would fight all the time. It got so bad that I started to get stomachaches and felt like throwing up. My mom thought I had some sort of illness and took me to a bunch of doctors. There was nothing wrong with me; it was just the fighting really got to me.”

Recently, I read about a 10-year-old child whose parents were in the middle of a terrible divorce. The book’s author had interviewed the child due to parental allegations of abuse. The author revisited the child 2 weeks after their initial meeting; this time in the hospital after the child had surgery to remove cancer. The sobbing child said, “I need a rest. Can I stay here?” I’m not saying that her cancer was directly related to her parents’ divorce. What I can tell you is that this child preferred being in a hospital to being in the middle of her conflicting parents’ divorce. She was crying out and clearly the stress was negatively impacting her life. Don’t allow this to be your child. I know you love your child. If you are in conflict with your former partner, make the changes you know are necessary to end the conflict now and improve your child’s environment, before it is too late.

Shannon R Rios MS is a successful Life Coach and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist. She coaches parents as a life coach through her life coaching business www.inlovewithme.com so that parents can move forward and create healthy lives and relationships with themselves, their children and others. She is also the founder of www.healthychildrenofdivorce.com

If you enjoyed this article, her best-selling book on parenting after divorce and healing after divorce is The 7 Fatal Mistakes Divorced and Separated Parents Make: Strategies for Raising Healthy Children of Divorce and Conflict and can be found here: http://inlovewithme.com/books