How a Separation Can Affect a Child's Self-esteem

When parents choose to split up, they obviously worry about the impact their separation will have on their child. Children inevitably suffer when Mummy and Daddy choose to go their separate ways, and the break-up of a familiar home life – even if it was a far from perfect one – can wreak havoc on a the way a child feels about life in general.

Separation and divorce are traumatic for a child, and your job as a parent is to make things easier, and minimise the instability and disruption to your child’s life. Making the process less painful and helping a child cope with feelings of unease, separation and even betrayal should be your first priority.

Once things start to settle down, however, it’s often easy to overlook the long-term effects a separation can have on children. In fact, new research says that children often feel the effects of their parent’s divorce not when they are actually splitting up, but post-divorce. It’s then that feelings of inadequacy, sadness and low self-esteem can begin to show up in children.

Divorce and Feelings of Self-Worth

Children whose parents divorced showed marked set-backs not only in interpersonal skills and feelings of self-worth but also in their maths abilities, according to researchers from the University of Wisconsin.

They conducted a study on 3,600 six-year-olds in 2008 – whose parents were divorced or from intact marriages - and tracked them through the next four years. They found that children from divorced parents had:

• Lower math skills – but not reading skills – as maths knowledge is cumulative and could be interrupted by negative feelings caused by divorce
• A marked inability to “express feelings in a positive way” which harmed them in both making and keeping friends
• Tendency to internalise problems which were typically characterized by anxiety, low self-esteem and feelings of sadness

Another study from a 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey, found that children of divorced parents were twice as likely to have a stroke as an adult than children of parents who were not divorced.

How You Can Help

Children model their own relationships on their parents’ relationship with each other, and when that is out of whack they suffer.

Separation and divorce are often inevitable, but there are ways that parents can respect and be kind toward each other, even if they are living apart or, indeed, are in new relationships. Helping your children deal with separating parents – and realise that their parents still love them even if they no longer love each other – is all-important.

You can do this by:

• Talking openly to your child about the separation, stressing that they are not the cause of the break-up and that both Mummy and Daddy’s feelings toward them has not changed.
• Not making your child take sides. Allow your child to do what is best for them, even if it hurts you. You are the grown-up, aren’t you?
• Allowing your child to express his or her feelings without the fear that their opinions or sense of hurt will only compound the problem. When children feel compelled to bottle things up, eventually they will explode.
• Resisting the urge to say negative things about your former partner in front of your child. In an ideal world, both parents should do all they can to be supportive about each other. Don’t rely on your child for emotional support either – find friends or a counsellor who can do that for you, and let your child remain a child.

A Secure World

Children who do not have stable, secure role models often look for relationships outside the home to provide them with what they are missing. Often, these relationships are not in their best interest, which is why a high percentage of children who join gangs or have inappropriate relationships at an early age are the children of divorced or separated parents.

Parents going through a separation are grappling with a difficult time in their lives, but it’s important to keep marital and parenting issues separate, and be there at all times for your child. How you react to the separation now can affect how your child will react to various events throughout his or her life.

Separation and/or divorce are never ideal situations when it comes to families. But you can minimise the disruption in your own children’s life by continuing to be their father, by seeing them regularly and having regular visits, and treating your ex-partner with respect in front of the kids, no matter what happened in the past. It’s important – not only for their development today, but for their own self-esteem and happiness in the future.

The Next Step

Now that you have read through the advice above, you might want to put it into practice. Our Rights Checker lets you check what legal rights you have as a separated father. Takes 2 minutes. Try it now →