I did so poorly on my first French vocabulary test, it was embarrassing. And because only the good students had been allowed to start an other foreign language, I really feared not being good enough for this class. The teacher came to talk with me and I immediately tried to ward her off – It’s just, my parents were fighting – and to my relief she lay off me. But my friend next to me, could not stop laughing – You lair. You just didn’t study last night. – she said. What was a joke to her heightened my sense of shame. I was lying. But for the live of me, my PTSD brain could not not even remember what I had been doing last night.
The research on the effects of divorce on children really picked up in the 1980s. People are aware, understanding and sympathetic. When I was growing up in the 90s, the theme of troubled children of divorce had become main stream in children’s books. And as I discussed in this article -> my mother said to me at Kindergarden age – no one will believe you. This is not what a broken home looks like. – But it was.
Many studies have shown that children of divorce have poorer grades than their peers. But the reasons or further risk factors are still explored today.
Is it the emotional upset?
Less time that a child spends with a parent?
Or financial cut backs?
With sociopathic parents, I haven’t gone a day without emotional upset. Though they were around they often refuse to look at me or talk to me. And although we never struggled financially, my parents enforced an impoverished lifestyle on me.
To gather empiric data it is easier to count divorces than to quantify the mental issues my parents have. And though they are different in nature, the effects they can have on the child can be some what similar, I’d say. So here by I take all shame off my younger self. Though I couldn’t say how my parents made school harder for me than it had to be, it was always them.
However, school grades don’t only reflect academic achievements. They are also indirect indicators of the interpersonal skills of a child and their emotional adjustment. And if there is one thing my parents taught me, it is how to people please.
Academic Performance in Children of Divorce: Psychological Resilience and Vulnerability (1991) D. J. Mulholland, N. F. Watt, A. Philpott, N. Sarlin
