How divorce impacts adolescence

Most divorcing parents devoutly wish that ending marriage and dividing the family unit will create no further family challenge and do their adolescent no lasting harm.
This hopeful outcome can prove less likely when grievances and hostilities that broke the marriage last after the divorce. Now young people have to live with ongoing feelings of injury and ill-will that continue to create tensions between Mom and Dad.
For many divorced parents, this is part of their recovery. It can still take some time living apart, but still connected through the children, to emotionally reconcile their differences and establish an amicable working relationship.
Sometimes there is the assumption that because in today’s society divorce has become relatively common, it has become more normal, and so is less impactful than it used to be. However, divorce is always experientially expensive to some degree, parents and adolescent personally and interpersonally experiencing some cost.
However, divorce can intensify adolescent growth and thus the relationship between adolescent and parents. In addition, young adult children of divorce can have some lasting divorce issues to deal with in the process of forming later love relationships of their own.
Because divorce usually catches young children (up to about 8 or 9) in the age of attachment and attachment parenting, common responses are often regressive ones, the girl or boy resorting to younger behavior like clinging more to parents for security and expressing grief at the loss.
Because divorce catches adolescents (beginning ages 9 – 13) in the age of detachment and detachment parenting, common responses are often aggressive ones, pushing against and pulling away from parents to exercise more control and assert more autonomy. The child of divorce tends to hold on to parents more; the adolescent of divorce tends to increasingly let parents go.
There are five psychological “engines” that propel adolescent growth which are often intensified by parental divorce. That is, the drive of each is often increased.
Separation: to establish social distance and privacy from parents as the competing family of peers and confiding in friends now matter more.
Challenge: to take risks and test capacities through braving new adventures so sense of competence and confidence can grow.

Read also: Signs of a marriage soon to crash

Curiosity: to rely on offline and online sources of information to satisfy an increased need to know about the larger world.
Autonomy: to assert increased opposition and self-determination to operate more on one’s own terms.
Maturity: to seek more responsibility for making personal choices, facing consequences, and directing one’s life.
Divorce often results in some loss of trust in, and respect for, the leadership of parents. This is not a loss of love, however, in adolescent eyes; though divorce parents have put adult self-interest above the interests of children and family.
In response, the teenager tends to become more detached from parents, increasingly self-dedicated and self-reliant, determined to take a firmer hold on the reins of her or his life, intensifying the engines of adolescent growth in the process.
If remarriage occurs, adolescent dedication to self-interest and self-management and self-direction can increase even more in response to parental attachment to step parent, and to the step parent’s family influence.
While parental divorce during a young person’s childhood can slow growth down as holding on to secure attachment is increased; during adolescence, when detachment is now underway, divorce can accelerate teenage letting go in pursuit of growing up and acting more independent.

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