What Divorce Does To A Child

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Alok Kanojia (1:03)

Hey chat, welcome to the Healthy GamerGG podcast. I'm Dr. Ollo Kanoja, but you can call me Dr. K.

I'm a psychiatrist, gamer, and co-founder of Healthy Gamer.

On this podcast, we explore mental health and life in the digital age, breaking down big ideas to help you better understand yourself and the world around you. So let's dive right in.

Hey, kid, let's sit down. Oh, let's look at this album from four years ago. You remember when we were a happy family? That's gone. That's finished. Oh, man, like there were some real, man, we had some really great times. That's never happening again. Your mom and dad are now split up. Let's like grieve together. Let's look at this stuff. Sit together and like do what grief is, which is reflect on the positive and like acknowledge like, oh, today, we're going to talk about the long standing impacts of divorce on the kids. So I saw this meme, which I think represents it very well, a loss of a sense of stability, difficulty feeling at home anywhere, difficulty forming social bonds. And the scary thing about this meme is that most of this is supported by the evidence, which is not something that a lot of people really realize, because nowadays divorce is so common that we're all huffing a lot of copium around divorce.

Parents will say things like kids bounce back. And that's sort of true, right? Children are absolutely resilient, but I think they bounce back kind of like if I drop a basketball, sure, it bounces, but it never goes back to the same height. It bounces, it kind of bounces back some, and this is what's scary about divorce is we see a lot of the most severe problems, like the ability to form relationships or the inability to form relationships, the higher rates of divorce later in life. So yeah, we bounce back, but like never quite all the way. So data shows that if you compare kids from intact households to kids from divorced households, kids from divorced households underperform intact households in so many ways. Academic performance, self-concept and confidence, psychological problems, behavioral problems, even things like social competence is lower. And the effects are like relatively small.

They're about 10% of a standard deviation to about 25% of standard deviation. So it's like not huge, right? So like kids do bounce back, but it sort of remains as a debuff. The bigger problem is like some of this copium like, okay, it's better for kids to have a quiet household, right? So it's not like it's healthier for children to have like a peaceful household than it is for parents to be warring all the time, which makes sense. So conflict between parents within the household is an adverse childhood experience that is damaging to children. Absolutely. But there's a flip side of this that is like really scary. Okay. So this meme is great because it says a distrust of stability for like the rest of your life. And let's understand what's happening there. So let's say I'm in a household where my parents are fighting all the time, and it can be a relief. They're like fine. Thankfully, they're out of the same household. They're no longer fighting. That's so much better for me. So yeah, that can be an improvement. But what do a lot of parents try to do? They're like, oh, we shouldn't fight in front of the kids, right? This is not the kids' fault. We shouldn't show them. We should present to United Front. We're going to fight over here. And now I want you guys to think about what is the experience of the child in that situation. So child comes home one day, parents set them down and say, Hey, little sonny, mom and dad are getting a divorce. We still love you. We love you, but mom and dad just have some problems. You guys aren't fighting in front of kids. You're doing a good job. Don't fight in front of the kids, right? Imagine how bewildering this is. There's data to even support this. That this actually creates the fear of stability, the distrust of stability, because now your child that hasn't seen any fighting doesn't know what's going on. You've protected them from it. Now it's like suddenly they come home and this foundation that I had faith in no longer exists. The most fundamental foundation that I've grown up with, stability in the household, mom and dad are home at the same time. Like, you know, like we're a family. The family unit, which is the foundation of my life suddenly gone, and I didn't have much of a warning sign. Maybe I had some warning sign, but I didn't really know because there's not overt conflict. So interestingly enough, a lack of overt conflict that results in divorce can lead to a child mistrusting stability even more. And these are the kinds of nuances that we don't understand about divorce. And my take as a psychiatrist is there is no such thing as a good divorce. Now there may be some harm reduction because overt conflict is bad. The problem is that divorce in general has negative consequences. And the biggest issue is while we're huffing copium, we don't directly address those negative consequences. Hey y'all, if y'all want to learn a little bit more, by all means, watch another YouTube video. If you guys are actually interested in finding the practical tools to change on your own, that's where Memberships comes in. And if y'all are interested in getting some help or achieving a particular milestone four weeks, eight weeks or 12 weeks from now, check out Coaching.