Full text of Tamara D Afifi’s TEDx Talk titled ‘The Impact of Divorce on Children’ at TEDxUCSB conference.
Listen to the audio version:
TRANSCRIPT:
Tamara D Afifi – Communications Scholar
A few days ago, I told my students I was going to be giving a TED Talk, and they had two responses. The first was, that is super cool, right, so would you agree, super cool, right? Woo-hoo, yeah! So I went from being kind of a geeky professor to still being a geeky professor, but being able to do something really cool.
The second reaction was, we want our voices to be heard. And so what I did was, I just asked them for a minute and a half just to take out a sheet of paper, and I said, I want you to write down something, you know, if there is anything that you would change about the way your parents communicated when you were growing up.
And the second question I said was, I want you to also think about something that you appreciate about the way they communicated with you, or with each other, growing up.
And this was one of the responses, I mean, keep in mind this was written in a minute and a half:
My parents never got a divorce, but I always wished they had. Even when they were both cheating on one another to get back at each other, or when child services got involved, or when all the friends and family encouraged them to end it, they still held on.
Now I’m 19 and scared to believe that anything lasts forever. Every relationship I go into, I constantly remind myself that in a month, or a year, or whatever, I’ll lose them.
I wish my parents had just ended it back when me and my brothers were little, that they hadn’t made me feel like their love-hate relationship with each other was more important than us.
However, they always reminded us that we were loved and that we mattered, forever and always. And we still stayed strong when it really mattered. I love them both.
Now imagine, you know, and this was anonymous, so collecting these and then kind of sifting through them after class and seeing that. You know, and then I kept sifting through, thinking, you know, and there were a bunch of them. There were really, really sad cases, and the majority were super positive, keep that in mind.
You know, but it really made me think as a professor, you know, looking across at my students, I was kind of dumbfounded, because I talked about divorce and conflict for like a class period and a half. Not once did it ever occur to me that a student was feeling that inside.
And I think a lot of parents face a similar situation, where they look at their child and they think their child is okay, and most children are, but inside, they might be feeling something very different, and they don’t talk about it, so parents just don’t know.
So today, I want to give children of divorce a voice. So like I said, I don’t have any fancy PowerPoint slides, I just have their voices, and some research thrown in.
In particular, I want you to see divorce through the eyes of the adolescents and young adults who’ve experienced it. And I often get asked the question: So what impact does divorce have on children? And my answer is always, it depends.
It depends upon a host of complex circumstances and situations, and children really vary in terms of how they respond to divorce. Some children actually fare a lot better if they’re removed from really conflicted, turbulent environments, and other children fare really poorly. And then other children aren’t affected at all.
Divorce does have, for most children, a short-term impact. Most children of divorce suffer from lower self-esteem, anxiety, depression, less quality contact with their parents, their standard of living decreases, and a lot of times, these short-term effects actually linger into adulthood and have long-term effects.
Some children continue to have psychological difficulties. Children of divorce, on average, tend to have less satisfied relationships with their parents later in life. They have more difficulty in their romantic relationships, and they’re much more likely to get divorced themselves.
And at this point in the lecture, the children who are from divorced families, the students want to get out and walk out, because it’s like, great, I’m screwed.
Is there hope? And yes, there is, because research actually shows that the differences or the effect sizes between children of divorce and children of parents who stay married are very small, primarily because there’s a lot of variance in how children respond to divorce.
What’s really interesting, Paul Amato, who’s a sociologist and one of my mentors, actually showed that these effect sizes, actually these differences, might be getting bigger, not smaller. He did a meta-analysis where he looked at hundreds of studies in children whose parents were divorced in the 70s and 80s and 90s, and it was really high, the effect of divorce on children in the 70s, decreased in the 80s, and increased in the 90s again.
So it’s kind of perplexing. Divorce is common, it’s less stigmatized, so why would the differences between children of divorced and non-divorced families be increasing?
You know, and Paul Amato, one of his suggestions was, well maybe it’s because the reasons for divorce are different than they used to be. When people got divorced in the 1970s, it was because it was a really bad marriage, right? You know, adultery, all these other things, and they really needed to get out of it.
Today, people are getting divorced for personal happiness, and that could really bother children, right? That’s not enough. People are getting divorced too easily.
When I ask my students, well what do you think? They actually argue it’s because children are closer to their parents now than they ever have been. When I think about my generation, and I just turned 40, I’m going to admit it on the web, whoo, just turned 40, right?
But I think my generation and older, you know, we talk to our parents on a Sunday night once a week, and that’s good. You know, good kids.
And we say hi and have good relationships, but those of you who are college students, how many of you talk to your parents once a day or once every other day? Yeah, the vast majority.
Whenever I ask my students, you know, classes of 100, 90% of them talk to their parents at least once a day. Text messaging, the phone, whatever they use, they talk to their parents a lot, and they feel extremely close to them.
Times are changing, partially due to technology and other things, but it might mean that when divorce happens, because they’re so close to their parents, it hurts them more.
So setting that aside, though, those effect sizes, those differences are still very small. So divorce matters, but what I want you to remember today is this point. There is one variable that determines more than any other how well children function after divorce, and that’s parents’ conflict.
I would say that the most profound finding on divorce in the past four decades is that parents’ conflict is more important than divorce per se in predicting how well children function. In fact, children whose parents have a lot of conflict and who stay married, those are the children that actually have the most difficulty psychologically, and have the most difficulty establishing satisfying relationships later in life, not the children, necessarily, whose parents divorce. It’s not so much about the divorce as it is how parents relate to each other.
You know, most people who have been married for 50 years are happily married, thank goodness, but there’s a subgroup of those people who’ve been married forever who really just don’t like each other. It’s sarcastic, I know it’s dark.
I kind of wish there was a special section of the Hallmark store for them. You know what I mean? Because the Hallmark is always like so flowery and beautiful, but there should be like a card that says, you’ve been married for 50 years, but have you been happy? Again, dark, I know.
But there are those subgroup of people who simply don’t believe in divorce. And I’m not saying that you should go out and get a divorce, I’m not an advocate of divorce, it’s really painful, and I do think people get divorced way too easily.
But parents also need to know that the way that they fight affects their children’s bodies. I remember a long time ago, I was doing field research and went into a family’s homes and I was spending anywhere from four to seven hours in their home, and I was interviewing and serving all the kids and the parents, everybody in the home, and I remember sitting on a couch with a child, Nate, he was 12 years old, sitting on the couch with him and asking him about his parents’ divorce.
And I remember him saying, you know, his stomach hurt a lot. At night his stomach would hurt. And then he would go to school and his stomach would still hurt. He had a hard time concentrating, and he was talking about how his parents fought a lot.
And then I asked him, well, have you talked to your parents about their fighting?
And he said, no, I don’t ever talk to them about it because if I bring it up it makes the conflict worse.
That defining moment, that had a big impact on my research. I walked away from that interaction with that child thinking, I’ve got to do something different other than self-reports, you know, or surveys, to try and show parents, look, the way that you’re fighting is affecting your children’s bodies.
And from that point forward, I began to look at physiology and children’s physical, physiological reactions to their parents’ conflict and other types of communication patterns. Through things like their heart rate, their galvanic skin response to their sweat or arousal, and looking at stress hormones.
And so, you know, when your body is stressed, your brain tells the rest of your body to emit hormones like cortisol. So we take people’s spit. You can tell a lot of things through a person’s spit. Although sometimes people don’t want to give us their spit, they’re a little bit hesitant because they’re like, are you cloning me? What are you going to do with this? DNA. You can’t actually tell a person’s DNA.
But we look at stress hormones, because you can tell just from someone’s spit how stressed their body is. And so, for example, we bring parents and adolescents into the lab. We sit them on a couch, and then we have them talk about something stressful about the parent’s relationship. And these are parents and kids from divorced and non-divorced families.
And then we take their spit before the interaction, and at three or four times after the interaction, to look at how their body is responding when they’re talking about something stressful related to the parent’s relationship.
And what we found, for example, is that parents that have really good communication skills, they don’t have very much conflict, they’re supportive, they’re competent in the way that they communicate, they’re affectionate, it doesn’t really stress out kids very much, that type of interaction. You know, they stress out a little bit, get a little bit anxious, and then their bodies are able to calm down really quickly. It doesn’t matter whether their parents are divorced or not.
The kids that have the most difficulty are the ones whose parents have a lot of conflict who are still married. Those kids, after that type of an interaction, their anxiety levels are like you bouncing a super ball in this room. Their bodies are less able to calm down after an interaction like that. Now, that’s just one interaction.
Now imagine if your parents are chronically fighting, you know, what that can do inside to a child’s body. Now, children of divorce whose parents had a lot of conflict also reacted. They had a delayed reaction, but then they were able to calm down again.
The other group of children that tend to have a really hard time with their parents’ divorce are the ones who never see it coming. So let me give you kind of an extreme example. A young woman came up to me after a class one day, and she was really bothered by that. It was actually after the lecture on divorce. I tend to bother people.
So, you know, her hands were all sweaty. I get that comment a lot, too. I make people all sweaty. So she comes up to me after class, and she’s like, you know, I thought my parents had the perfect marriage, and my friends always told me, your parents have the perfect marriage. So she went off to college, and her parents sprung a divorce on her, and that’s actually not all that uncommon.
And then she said, you know, and my mom is my best friend, and so my mom confided in me that she was cheating on my dad, but that my dad didn’t know. And she said, should I continue to see this other person, or should I break up with your father?
Now, you can imagine what that would do to a person’s body. So she said, Professor Afifi, what should I do?
You know, oh, you know, you think I’m nervous now. Like, then I was like, oh, I, you know, and I actually said two things. I said, one, I’m really sorry that you’re in that situation. Number two, I said, why do you know this information? I said, that’s a lot of weight for a college student to have that type of information. And I said, you know what? You should be worried about what you’re going to wear on Friday night. You should be worried about getting good grades. You should be worried about going out with your friends and what type of career you might have.
Instead, she was worried day in and day out, every minute of the day, what are my parents going to do? Her mom, and they have a really close relationship, but parents have to be very careful so that that doesn’t tip over, right, so that their child doesn’t become their confidant, their best friend, another parent, and that’s a slippery slope.
And I think that’s a generational difference as well that we’re facing, so that closeness is a good, you know, is a good thing, but she felt caught between her parents. That’s what really bothers adolescents and young adults, is when they feel caught or torn between their parents.
When children feel caught or torn between their parents, they’re tugged between different loyalties. They love both of their parents, right, so they’re trying to maintain these relationships and defend their parents in the presence, parent in the presence of the other. Children feel torn when their parents make them mediaries, when they make them messengers of information. They ask them to relay information, they use inappropriate disclosures, and it can be very, very small things.
So, for example, the dad says, can you just remind your mom that you have a dentist appointment on Tuesday? Easy, right? The child goes to the mom, mom, dad said I have a dentist appointment on Tuesday. And the mom’s like, well, why did your dad just tell me that? Like, why doesn’t your father ever talk to me? Can you tell your father he needs to talk to me more? It was a simple task. Turns into a child feeling caught.
Unfortunately, when children feel caught, what they tend to do, because it creates dissonance, anxiety in their brains, right? But unfortunately, the way that they settle that dissonance is by forming an alliance with one parent against the other. And they don’t mean to do it, it’s just easier.
Unfortunately, so they might maintain a really close relationship with one parent, but they lose the connection with the other. I don’t know how many quotes I got from students in these classes that said, because of that one thing, I lost a relationship with my mom or dad for three years. And it’s never been the same.
So how else do children respond when they feel caught? They avoid. They don’t want to talk about it. Right?
So when they avoid, the parents don’t realize it exists very much. So they keep on talking. And the child keeps on avoiding, so it’s a vicious cycle. Sometimes the second reaction that they have is they become aggressive, right? They mimic their parents’ conflict in return. The third thing they do is they directly confront their parents and say, look, you need to keep me out of this. And that actually is the most effective for them, but they have to say it numerous times.
But that only comes with age. Because we tell our children, don’t talk back to your parents, right? So they’re not going to talk back to their parents, usually. As they age, they increase in their competence and their ability to, or they gain efficacy. They think they now have the ability to tell their parents, like, look, don’t put me in the middle of it.
So I wanted to end on a positive note, because I said I would.
What can parents do? That’s the big question.
And I felt this talk today was really important because I want to give parents efficacy. What can they do? How can I feel like I can do something so that my children don’t get put in the middle?
And I think parents feel very frustrated because they feel like they can control their own actions, but they can’t control the bad behavior of the other parent.
Well, the first thing you need to do is, if you can cooperate, try and create rules between each other for how you’re going to communicate to each other and to your children. And try to co-parent together. That’s the best alternative. But if you’ve tried and tried and tried and that’s not working, the parent continues to badmouth you. Don’t engage. Let go. Focus on your own behavior.
Because time and time again, adolescents and young adults will tell you, I respected that. I could see what was going on. And my mom or my dad didn’t go there. You know, when our, I said we had two little girls, one six and one eight, you know how they squabble like sisters do, siblings do.
So like one will come to me and say, you know, Mom, my sister keeps picking on me. And I say, well, what would happen if you didn’t talk to her back? You know, really, what would happen if you didn’t engage? Just don’t fight back. She’s going to get bored. Right?
Same thing happens with adults. If you don’t engage, your behavior can actually affect the other behavior. Because they’re not, it’s not a game anymore.
The second thing is to figure out where the emotions are coming from. Robert Emery, who was a clinician and a researcher who studies divorce, said, you know, sometimes parents, former spouses, are really angry at each other because they hate each other. And sometimes they’re really angry at each other because they still love each other. So you have to figure out why are you so angry.
And then you have to figure out how to redefine your relationship. You’re no longer married to each other. You’re co-parents. So trying to figure out how you can go from spouses to co-parents effectively.
And the last thing that I would recommend is trying to take away some of the emotions. In conflict in general, people tend to say the worst things, things that they regret when they’re highly emotional. Highly angry. Highly sad. So try and diffuse some of the emotions. Something very simple, for example, is to email the parent instead of talking to them face-to-face so much or via the phone. Email has its own issues, but it does tend to diffuse emotion.
And the last and final point that I wanted to make to parents, the most important thing you can do is to listen to your child’s voice. They may not say anything, but try and put yourself in your child’s shoes and think of the long-term impact that this would have and listen to their inner voice.
