As children’s church leaders we may never know how our words and actions might impact a child of divorced, never married or separated parents. This week I was blessed to find out how much I had said over a year ago impacted a young man’s life.

In the fall of 2010 and early 2011 I led DC4K, DivorceCare for Kids, at a church in North Carolina. That next summer I moved to Florida to be near my own grandchildren. I have never completely left the family of one little boy from the class. We stay in touch through FaceBook.

This week I noticed a message his mom had posted on FaceBook.

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A New Report

Melinda Lundquist Denton of Clemson University conducted a study of the spiritual impact of divorce  which offers a new way of looking at the spiritual impact of divorce. The results were released in the article, “Family Structure, Family Disruption, and Profiles of Adolescent Religiosity” published in Journal For The Scientific Study of Religion.

How Is This Study Different?

The report explains that many of the reports that have been done thus far on the spiritual impacts of divorce on kids have utilized a “variable-centered” approach. In other words, they have measured the effect of divorce on one individual measure of religion. In other words, previous studies, for example, might have asked “What is the impact on divorce on a child’s religious attendance?” or “How does divorce affect a child’s prayer life?”

By contrast, Denton’s current report takes a “person-centered” approach to studying the impact of divorce which accounts for the varied ways in which children understand and practice their religious faith. As such, it is better able to capture and analyze the “complex religious profiles of adolescents.”

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While serving children and their families, our hearts are tuned in to their care. So, what are we to do when we find out a child’s parents are getting or have gotten divorced? Here are a couple of thoughts as we seek to serve the family.

1. Ask Questions & Listen

Every family loves to be listened to and to be heard, especially families experiencing a divorce. Ask questions. Ask both surface questions as well as deep questions, and then your job is to listen. Truly listen. This type of listening includes repeating the same words and phrases back to the family to see if they agree with your statement. If they continue on in their conversation that means you’ve listened correctly. The main thing to be aware of with asking questions and listening is to always respect the level of information the family wants to share. Not respecting their level of privacy demonstrates that you as the caregiver are seeking to know information more than wanting to do what’s best for the family.

2. Volunteer consistently, allowing church to be a consistent place with a consistent face.

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Editor’s Note: “Understanding Divorce and Children” was originally published on Ministry-to-Children.com in the Summer of 2011. It has been updated and revised with new information for publishing here on Hope4HurtingKids.com. We hope that you find it useful.

You might be surprised to find out that the divorce rate in the United States is actually decreasing and has been since it reached its high point in the early 1980s. Despite the relatively small decrease, it is still an epidemic. Recent studies show that the projected divorce rate for first marriages in this country is approximately 43%. For second marriages, that rate shoots up to 60%. Indeed, while the decrease in the rate of divorce is a good thing, it is driven primarily by an increase in cohabitation and failure to marry rather than a “real” decrease in divorce.

You might think, given the Biblical mandates on divorce, that divorce rates in the church would be much lower than those in the general population. Unfortunately, that is not true! According to a Barna study done in 2004:

Although many Christian churches attempt to dissuade congregants from getting a divorce, the research confirmed a finding identified by Barna a decade ago (and further confirmed through tracking studies conducted each year since): born again Christians have the same likelihood of divorce as do non-Christians.

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H4HK FAQs are designed to answer questions kids and teens ask when facing difficult situations and circumstances in their lives.

Divorce brings all kinds of changes into your life.  Some changes are obvious.  You no longer live in the same house with both your mom and your dad.  Maybe you spend most of your time at one parents’ house and visit the other parents’ house every other weekend, or maybe you split your week between two houses.  Sometimes one parent moves far away and most of your contact with them will be by phone or e-mail.  In some cases, children of divorce don’t see one of their parents very often or at all.  There are many other potential changes.  You might have moved out of your house following the divorce and live in a brand new house or apartment.  Maybe you go to a brand new school or you’re in a living in a new neighborhood or going to a new church.

Some changes in your life are not obvious.  Other people probably don’t even notice these types of changes in your life at all, but you probably do.  Maybe your family had a special Christmas tradition before the divorce that you no longer get to do.  Perhaps you used to sit down every Saturday morning as a family for a pancake breakfast with dad that doesn’t happen anymore since the divorce.  Maybe it’s as simple as missing how Dad used to stop by your bedroom door every night and tell you “Sweet Dreams” as you were drifting off to sleep.  All of these little things may not seem important by themselves, but they form an important part of what we see as “normal.”  We call these little things that you’ve gotten used to rituals and routines and they define what “normal” is to us.

One important things that you can do after a divorce to help things get back to “normal” is to come up with some new rituals and routines to engage in with your family.  They may not be the same rituals and routines from before the divorce, but they can be just as fun and with time they will become just as important to you.  You’ll need to come up with some rituals and routines that work for you and you family, but here are some suggestions:

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No one plans to get divorced. But more than one million children in the U.S. will experience its affects this year alone. Divorce has become a reality in our culture and innocent children are coping with the consequences every day.

The good news is that divorce need not wound and scar your children if you put their emotional and psychological needs first when making crucial decisions. It’s misguided parents – angry, resentful, hurt and mistrusting – who unintentionally set their children up for painful outcomes. These parents don’t understand that every decision they make regarding their divorce will affect the well-being of their children in countless ways. The emotional scars are not only harder to see, they’re also much harder to erase.

Here are five keys to helping your children move through and thrive after divorce.

1. Remind them this is not their fault.

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H4HK FAQs are designed to answer questions kids and teens ask when facing difficult situations and circumstances in their lives.

Divorce brings with it all kinds of different emotions.  If your parents are divorced, you already know that.  Sometimes you will be sad, sometimes angry, sometimes lonely, and sometimes many other different emotions.  But, is it ok to be happy?  Shouldn’t you be upset and sad following your parents’ divorce? …at least for a little while?

Some kids are happy following their parents divorce, and that is ok!  Maybe your parents fought a lot.  That can be very stressful to you as their child, and maybe you are happy that you just don’t have to listen to it anymore.  Maybe your Dad pays more attention to you when you spend time together after the divorce than he ever did before.  That can definitely make you happy.  Maybe you’ve had to move or something else that you view your life like a big adventure, and going on that adventure makes you happy.  It doesn’t matter what it is that makes you happy, the important thing to remember is that it is perfectly acceptable for you to be happy following your parents’ divorce.  And, no one should tell you otherwise.

When you are happy, enjoy it!  Even if you are generally happy with the divorce, there will likely be times when that fades and you’re not so happy anymore.  That’s ok too.  Sometimes we are  happy, and sometimes we are not – that doesn’t change after a divorce.  The important thing is that we understand that however we feel, that’s ok.  It is also important to recognize how we feel and find someone we trust to talk to about it.  So, if you’re happy go find something fun to do and enjoy being happy.  There is plenty of time for other emotions at a later time.

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With the increasing number of kids from divorced and disrupted homes, you may be left wonder how the church should respond to these changes in our society.

What We Need To Do In the Church to Help Spiritual Development

Judith Wallerstein, in The Unexpected Legacy, the Twenty Five Year Landmark Study, advocates for strengthening marriages. This can be accomplished through marriage retreats, Bible studies on what the Bible says about marriages and numerous other means. We have to model good marriages for the child of divorce. We have to mentor the children in divorced families and expose them to happy and healthy two-parent families.

Doug Dees in Baker’s Hand Book of Single Parenting calls it grafting. He says to graft a single parent family with a two-parent family. Grafting is where you place or join a single parent family into the healthy two-parent family like you would graft one plant into another one. The two-parent family can help parent the child in the single parent family. The two-parent family can walk alongside the single parent.

We need to teach children what the Bible says about divorce. We don’t need to heap condemnation on them but gently explain that divorce is not God’s design for us. They need to know that God allowed divorce because of hardness of heart but that He hates divorce. He hates it because he knows how much divorce hurts everyone, including the children. However, God’s forgiveness can extend even our parents when they sin.

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H4HK FAQs are designed to answer questions kids and teens ask when facing difficult situations and circumstances in their lives.

When parents get divorced, there are many things that have to be divided between them.  Things like family pictures, checking accounts, vehicles and much more is divided.  Sometimes parents agree how to split these items up, and other times a judge tells people who are divorcing how their stuff will be divided up.

The same things happens for time spent with you.  Before the divorce, you probably spent time with both parents, but after the divorce there will be some sort of visitation schedule that determines who you will spend time with and how much time you will spend with each parent.

One of the other things that gets split up in a divorce is the family’s income (how much money your parents’ earn).  The judge, or your parents if they can agree on an amount, will determine who gets what portion of the family’s income.  The goal is to make sure both parents, and houses, have enough money to live on, but this doesn’t always happen because now the same income has to support two homes instead of just one.

Sometimes one parent earns more than the other parent – maybe your dad worked prior to the marriage and your mom stayed at home or vice versa.  In that case, one parent will earn more money.  In order to make things more fair, the judge may decide that one party has to pay support to the other.  There are two types of support a judge might order – alimony and child support.

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When I was a kid and had a kids’ crush on some young lady, I would often pick a daisy, a beautiful wildflower, from one of the fields on our Pennsylvania Farm. It was a superstitious way to determine if the young lady loved me. You would pull off a petal and say, “She loves me”, then the next petal, “She loves me not”, and then keep going petal after petal with the hope that when you had one last petal left the verdict would be, “She loves me”. In reality, it meant nothing.

That’s the way many hurting kids go through life, wondering if anyone loves them one day, and the next day thinking that someone might love them. We all desire to be loved by someone. In situations of divorce a child is often left feeling like Mom or Dad doesn’t really love them. After all, maybe Dad, or Mom, has deserted the family. The sense of rejection and hurt from that is incredible. No one senses it more than the children. Sometimes Mom or Dad starts dating another and that new person becomes the new center of the parents’ universe leaving the children feeling pushed aside.

Today there are thousands of hurting kids going through life thinking they are unloved and rejected. I felt that way many times growing up, and know the raw emotion in the heart. It so reflects itself in the life of the child. You may see it as depression, it can be reflected in bad relationships and acting out or in turning to drugs and sex. Often times the negative behavior is a crying out for love, “Oh I want someone to love me”. Kids may turn to gangs or some other group just seeking some form of acceptance, understanding and love – even a very questionable “love”.

These same feelings carry on well into adulthood, and if they are not cared for can lead to some pretty dangerous places. There are those sitting in prison today that were on a search for acceptance and love. There are unwed Moms who were just seeking for someone to love them, and mistakenly thought sexual pursuits would provide it, only to find it did not. Some kids have made the ultimate decision to end their lives, all because they felt as though no one loved them and no one ever would.

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