The impact of divorce on teenagers

Divorce is common in the contemporary way of life and deserves objective study. It may have redeeming features, but from the point of view of children, divorce is a stressful experience because of the disruption of the home and its financial, emotional, and social costs. The adverse impact, however, can be minimized by realistic and sensitive attention to its effects on children. Although divorce alters the living arrangements of affected families, it does not end family relationships. For this reason, marriage and divorce counseling should deal with the perspectives of both adults and children. Most teenagers and their parents adjust to divorce and later regard it as having been a constructive action; but one-third do not. In those instances the turbulence of the post-divorce phase plays a crucial role in influencing pathological reactions in affected teenagers. The physician is in a strategic position to act as diagnostician, a clarifier of values, an educator in the facts of family life and divorce, a counselor in working through feelings about and attitudes toward divorce, and a source of support for teenagers.