Introduction
It is the wish of every married couple to remain together and develop a strong family where children are well catered for. However, this is not always the case, as time goes, situations change in a relation and the couple may be completely incompatible. This result into separation and in most cases, this eventually results to a divorce. Divorce has got number negative effects on the entire family and if not well handled, divorce may result to prolonged mental and emotional disorder. This paper focuses on evaluating two perspective of divorce on families using examples based on media, experience or observation.
Two Perspectives on the Effect of Divorce on Families
The two perspectives to be considered in this include the view that effect of divorce the family starts long before the divorce or the separation is enacted. According to this perspective, divorce is a process that starts when couples develop irreconcilable differences. These differences result to conflicts, which creates emotional, estrangement, or unraveling separation. This takes place long before the actual divorce takes place. Actually, it happens during marriage, when the married couples start to feel estranged from each other. Conflicts between them and between parents and children increase, they turn to be frequent and frequently go unresolved. Feelings of anger, helplessness, and bitterness increases as the partners evaluate the benefits and costs of separation or going on with the marriage. All these conflict and bad experience between each other and children witnessing all this highly affect the spouse mental and emotional health and also that of their children. According to this perspective, the divorce process or what transpired before the divorce is what highly affect the family rather than the actual separation (Demo et al., 2015).
The second perspective claims that children are more affected by a divorce after their parents have separated and they have to live in absence of one parent. However, the effect of the divorce on children will depend on a number of factors which include the children’s age, the conflict level between the parents, and whether they are fully living with one parent or it is a joint custody among other things. According to this perspective, young children are highly affected by their parent’s divorce and they always consider their contribution in it. Adolescent may cope or turn to be moody while teenagers tend to support one parent and blame the other one for divorce. In this case, children and couples are more affect on the change of life due to divorce while in the first perspective family is affected by the state of life before the couples decide to separate (Wetchler & Hecker, 2015).
Based on my observation, families that are just about to experience the divorce are more troubled than those whose fate has already been decided. While a family is in the process to a divorce, there are always so many conflicts and uncertainties such that, everyone feels more settled when the divorce is decided on. Therefore, conflicts before and during the divorce process are so stressing such that the divorce is a form of relief for all despite other challenges would bring to the family
In my view the first perspective is weightier than the second perspective. When parents are fighting in a house, both children and the couples are highly affected by the situation. The atmosphere full of tension and anxiety is always expected and thus, mental stability and peace is very far away from such families. The children and couples are normally fearful of the tragedy the next conflict would cause. In this regard, a divorce in this case would be a relief for both the couples and the children. The emotional distress and uncertainties which may result to emotional distress are eliminated and thus, this perspective seems stronger. According to this perspective, the divorce just come to ease the problems the family was facing and thus, the parent can now focus on their life and that of their children without much fights and need to understand each other.
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