YOUNG people today are far less likely than previous generations to see their parents’ divorce as a tragedy that will blight their lives forever, research has found. They are far more likely to regard it as an “everyday problem”.

If only the grown-ups could see it that way too, the research suggests, everybody involved might be a lot happier.

Bren Neale, principal research fellow at the Centre for Research on Family, Kinship and Childhood at Leeds University and co-author of the study of the effects of divorce on children, said that her findings suggested that society needed to “move on” in the way it thought about divorce. “Seeing it as many children do, in the broader context of life, we might learn to see divorce as an everyday problem, rather than the defining feature of their lives,” she said.

She added that for many young people the departure of a parent or the arrival of a step-parent and stepbrothers and sisters could be hugely positive. She said it was only when changes happened too fast or when they all came at once that they became hard for children to cope with.

Dr Neale and her colleague Jennifer Flowerdew followed 60 young people aged eight to 18 over four years after their parents had divorced, interviewing them at the start and end of the study. Their findings are published this week in a book called Parent Problems Two, which consists of the young people’s testimony.

The findings suggest that there is such a thing as a “good divorce” and that to find out how to achieve it, parents should pay more attention to how their children really feel, rather than how they think they feel. “A substantial majority of young people in our study had moved on from their parents’ divorce and had become preoccupied with the challenges of their own lives. They did not want to be typecast as the children of divorced parents,” Dr Neale said.

An 18-year-old boy, Joey, told the researchers: “It hurt and it was hard at the time. But I’ve got used to it now and it’s not something that I’m permanently ‘ohhh’ about. I’m not damaged by it, definitely not.” Hetti, 14, said: “You’re not affected by your parents in everything. I mean you’ve got to have it within yourself to get on in the first place.”

Dr Neale, a child and family sociologist, said that experience of divorce was changing. “What emerged from previous research, 15 years earlier, were sad tales of children desperately wanting their parents to get back together. But the children in our study said, ‘Oh, we are just from ordinary divorced families’. If we are not careful, we can create a millstone around their necks. We have to ‘de-centre’ divorce. At the moment we see it as the central thing that defines children,” she said.

The increasing prevalence of divorce and the decline in the social stigma attached to it was behind this change, she suggested. The most recent government figures on divorce showed that marriage break-ups rose by 5,755 to 153,490 in 2003 — the third successive annual rise and the biggest rise in one year since 1985. More than 150,000 children under 16 were affected.

Dr Neale said that her research gave insights into what made for a good divorce, as well as illustrating that post-divorce families could be just as viable as traditional nuclear families. She hoped her book would help society draw up a new etiquette for divorce.

Dr Neale said she hoped, above all, that the book would be of help to children who had experienced divorce. “We asked the children what they would want to get out of this research and they said they wanted to see what other children had said,” she said.

Patricia Morgan, a sociologist and author of Marriage-Lite, expressed concern that Dr Neale’s book underestimated the potential problems for children of divorced parents. “It seems to be denying the evidence that, on average, children don’t do as well developmentally after divorce,” Ms Morgan said. “Children might be able to get over it — they can get over most things — but my concern is that it hurts them in the here and now.”

THAT'S LIFE

“All that with Mum and Dad, it’s just not worth my time,” Jason, 16
“Just because you split up, it doesn’t mean that you are going to ruin your children’s lives,” Hector, 13
“I knew it was always for the best,” Sabrina, 17
“In a lot of instances, it’s just best to let go,” Jake, 14
“I never think, ‘God, I wish they were together’, because I don’t, honestly, I don’t,” Jack, 15
“I think you forget about it, all your emotions go,” Ralph, 14

SOURCE: PARENT PROBLEMS TWO BY BREN NEALE AND JENNIFER FLOWERDEW

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