Can someone finish my research prompt for me. I already started it and did a little over 1000 words, and the rough draft of 2000 words needs to be done tomm. Its about how divorce of parents affects a childs mental helath

Hayden Feinberg 1

ENC2135 Comment by hayden feinberg: 1

March 20th 2018

My area of expertise is family issues and the effects these issues have on children, and my divisive topic is whether or not divorce of parents affect their children’s mental health. Some believe that divorce does affect children’s mental health for several reasons, some being that: Divorce has negative effects on psychological adjustment in children, which ends up negatively affecting parenting abilities, causing psychological issues for children. While some people believe that divorce can lead to strong healthy relationships with parental figures, which can be beneficial if they don’t have the best relationships with their either of their biological parents to begin with. This paper will be about how children of divorce should receive additional government-aided support because children of divorce are more prone to mental health issues .

There are several factors behind why I believe divorce leads to mental health depletion of children, because of the stress it causes amongst family members, negatively affecting a child’s mental health development. There was a meta-analysis comparing children with single and divorced parents, and children with families whose parents relationships were intact and going strong. Children whose parents were divorced scored much lower than children whose parents were together. Studies have shown that the children affected by divorce will display negative consequences in their well-being and psychological development.

Studies have proven that divorce not only affects children psychological development but it has unfortunate effects on many different aspects in a child’s life. Parental divorce can affect a child’s ability to succeed scholastically, relationship between a child and either of their parents, social-competence, self esteem, and conduct in and out of a school setting. There are many reasons to support why divorce leads to a child’s mental health depletion, but generally divorce may lead to poor economic status, parental absence, and family demonstrated through a longitudinal correlational study using a model that focused on self-esteem, distress, satisfaction, and happiness in adults, in relation to parental situations during childhood that the event of parental divorce during a person’s childhood, can even lead to lowered psychological well being of a person in adulthood. This provides evidence for my argument that psychological wellbeing is negatively affected by divorce not only during childhood, but also in adulthood showing long term effects.

As per my aforementioned points, many studies have proven that when examining people with good marital status and emotional wellbeing and examining people who are not married and are divorced; the people who are stable and married show to be in a better physical and mental state. In the correlation study examined in “Changes in Depression Following Divorce: A Panel Study”, the correlation study of divorce and depression, using a Metropolitan Chicago sample, displayed that right after divorce depressive affect were not significantly found, but years after the divorce, there was an onset of depression in divorced people. This aids in my argument in that offspring of divorced parents have negatively affected mental health not only in childhood, but also into adulthood because other research shows that parental depression is associated with offspring depression (Pilowsky ​et al.​ 2006) and thus, if the parental depression is occurring years after divorce and causing depression of the child, then depression of the child would also be occurring later after the divorce when the child is closer to adulthood or even already an adult, depending on the age of the child at the time of divorce. According to the correlation study there are many different characteristics that one should examine when it comes to different situations in a couple or family’s life. When a family is experiencing a divorce it leads to not just the loss of the mother and father’s relationship, but so many more adverse losses. Loss of the source of income that one parent or the other might have been contributing to the household, loss of an intimate relationship, loss of a mother or father role in a household, and in most cases loss of a residence the children and family may be used to. When there is an economic change in a household following divorce, this can lead to many emotionally destructive factors. Child support comes into action following my claim on how families economic statuses are usually negatively affected during and after divorce. Foster (1978:13) stated that one of the most violated laws in history is the failure to violate the child support agreement. When there becomes conflict between parents in this field, this leads to an immense amount of family tension. Lawyers are now involved and children begin to take on unnecessary amounts of stress and anxiety that adds on to the depletion of their mental health. Going further about the loss of intimate relation that occurs during and after a divorce can be immensely affected to both spouses and their offsprings. When people are together they form a bond that usually may feel irreplaceable and like no other. Even though the reason for the divorce was that the relationship seemed problematic, conflicted, or disconcerting, going through a divorce is proven to be painful for both spouses, and the children. In most cases when people are married everything is shared, and when this divorce is occuring they are forced to view life independently, and this can be damaging and extremely painful for everyone in the family. Not only are the parents experiencing a loss of someone they are used to being in their lives every day, their children are too. This adjustment can be awfully effective for the parents, as well as the children, and as much as either parent will try, there emotions will take over and this can affect their parenting abilities and may cause absence of either parent, which then will interfere with their child’s psychological development.

In (Downey, T. Wayne. “The Disavowal of Authority in a Child of Divorce.” ​The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child​, vol. 43, no. 1, 1988, pp. 279–289) a detailed detailed, eye-opening case study of a young girl, Downey goes into depth about the “frightened, passive, withdrawn” characteristics with a “battlefield” of treatment for depressive affects during and after the process of the girl’s parents divorcing. The case study displays a real-life example of a child of divorced parents who experiences life-changing negative psychological changes that are not fixed with ease in psychotherapy, these problems are not only very severe but sometimes have to be dealt with medically.