Divorce is clearly one of the greatest stresses a person can experience.
Although some of these divorces occur before there are children involved, there are still a high percentage of children who will experience divorce. Children are often unable to cope with the separation of their parents and often experience detrimental psychological effects.
Anyone going through divorce should acknowledge that they will be experiencing heartbreak, pain, and most of all confusion. These feelings do not only pertain to the parents, but the children, who are most of the time neglected and taken for granted. Although the parents going through the divorce believe they are suffering the most, it is in most cases that the children are experiencing most of the torment and a lot of heartache.
During divorce children often feel that they are torn between the parents. They are not sure how to act toward them, and are afraid they will hurt their feelings if their actions are wrong, or favorable toward one or the other. Children sometimes worry that they are the cause, of the separation, and spend most of their time trying to make their parents happy. This continuous distressing makes their lives even more miserable, and leads them to focus their attention on their parents' emotions instead of their own. It seems that sometimes both the parents and children do not fully understand the effect that emotions have on someone when they are held inside, for long periods of time. In fact, in some extreme cases when the true feelings are never revealed, they can be expressed in ways of explosive anger and violence. Depending on the age, children's emotions go through dramatic changes. For example: young preschool children respond to the separation with irritability, !
whining, sleep problems, acute separation anxieties,
escalation of aggressive behavior, and tantrums. Some children show aggression and anxiety increase. They have...