Children suffer the most when parents divorce

A recent study conducted in the United States of America, says that children suffer the most when parents divorce. Further more when parents prolong an unhappy marriage and avoid a divorce for the sake of children, instead of doing the children good, it will only do more damage to the kids, the authors of the study say.

Dr. Allan Booth and Dr. Paul R. Arnato of Pennsylvania State University in University Park conducted the exhaustive study over a seventeen-year period and studied over 2000 married individuals and nearly 700 children. They also studied 85 divorces that occurred during the study period. They say pre-divorce marital conflicts harm the children more than the actual divorce itself. Another finding was that children of parents in high conflict relationships, who divorced, were better off emotionally than children of parents in high conflict relationships, who chose to remain together. The study also went into causes of divorce and mentions that parents who are less rooted in their communities, who are less religious, who have few friends, who don’t own a house and who move their residences often are more prone to divorce than others. Dr. Booth says that ultimately if a marriage cannot be preserved till the children become young adults, then every effort should be made to attend to the needs of the children first. This should be the first priority he says.