As children’s ministry leaders you may have found the article posted last week, “Understanding the Short-Term Legacies of Divorce,” interesting and relevant to the work you are currently doing with the children in your church. This week, as we discuss the long-term legacy of divorce, you might be inclined to think that understanding these is not as important as many are not likely to show up until children have left your ministry. Quite to the contrary, it is important for you to recognize the long-term legacies of divorce so that, as church leaders, you can help an individual child to better cope and potentially even lessen the impact of a particular long-term legacy.

While the long-term legacy of divorce may, and likely will, still affect the child in future years, your input today may help to lessen the severity of the impact as opposed to the child who hasn’t been exposed to the love of Christ and a loving church family.  As churches become more cognizant about the impact of divorce on children they can step up minister more effectively to these children. This can take many forms including hosting support groups such as DivorceCare for Kids for elementary age children and “The Big D” for teens dealing divorce. Churches can tailor a bible study class or VBS to accommodate hurting children of divorce. These types of ministries and programs can and will give children better outcomes overall as they grow and mature surrounded by the love of God in a church family.

It is important to remember that not every child of divorce will be affected by divorce in the same way. The purpose of this article is to discuss general long-term legacies of divorce that many children experience. If you read the statistics on some of these issues, it can be frightening and disheartening. When I became a single parent, my children were eight and twelve years of age. At first I bought into all the hype and statistics about children of divorce. I felt like my children were doomed. I remember praying and begging the Lord to not let my twelve-year-old daughter get pregnant at fifteen and to allow my son to graduate from high school and not get involved in drugs. What a pitiful prayer! I shudder to think what would have happened to my children if I had held onto those pathetic thoughts. Along the way, the Lord helped me realize my children could survive and thrive.

Today, we want to look at some of the long-term impacts that divorce has on children as they mature into teenagers, young adults and even adulthood. Much of the information in this article comes from my own observations from working with children of divorce for over thirty years. It also comes from the nation’s leading adult support group called DivorceCare and from interviewing many adult children of divorce.

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The following relates my experience volunteering in my very first 13 week session of Divorce Care 4 Kids (DC4K) back in 2011. Since that time, I have gone on to lead a number of DC4K groups at multiple locations and will lead my next group starting in mid January of next year..  I hope that you will find this telling of my experience both informative and useful.  Ultimately, I hope in some way that it will lead you to getting involved in DC4K ministering to children of divorce or ministering to hurting kids in some other capacity.

One question that I get asked more than any other since I started working with children of divorce is:

What can a church do to minister to children of divorce?

I believe there are number of things that the church must do in order to truly minister to children of divorce. One significant thing a church can do is to start a support group for kids who have been, or are going, through a divorce. The best program that I am aware of for churches is Divorce Care 4 Kids (DC4K).

What is DC4K?

Divorce Care 4 Kids is a 13 week curriculum developed by Church Initiative who also produce Divorce Care, Grief Share, Single & Parenting and Chance to Change. According to the DC4K website,

DC4K is a special group to help your children heal from the pain caused by a separation or divorce. DC4K provides your children with a safe and neutral place to recognize and learn to share their feelings.

For 13 weeks your children become involved in a fun, caring group at a church near you. The weekly session topics help your children learn that God’s love strengthens them and helps them turn their sadness to hope and their anger to joy.

Each session is filled with motivating and exciting activities. Games, crafts, role-playing, discussion times, journaling and activity books help your children process the divorce and move forward in their lives. The music CDs, snacks, read aloud stories, exercises and Bible verses teach your children to relax and rest secure in God’s love. The Kids Like Me and Stories from the Bible video dramas present stories of children just like your children, who are experiencing divorce-related problems and have found help and encouragement.

DC4K is a powerful ministry for kids 5–12 years of age.

What Topics Does DC4K Cover?

During the 13 week course, the DC4K curriculum covers a variety of topics in a setting where your kids can feel safe. The topics covered by week include:

• What’s Happening to My Family?
• God Loves Children in All Kinds of Families
• Facing My Anger
• Journey from Anger to Sadness
• I Am Not Alone
• God’s Plan for Me
• Developing New Relationships
• Developing Money Smarts
• It’s Not My Fault
• Telling My Parents How I Feel
• Forgiveness
• Loving My Parents
• Moving On: Growing UP and Closer to God

What Does A Child Experience at a DC4K Session?

Although you can customize what you do for any given week, a common session might include:

• A video presenting circumstances that a child of divorce can relate to.
• A video presenting a relevant Bible story.
• Journaling and drawing pictures in a child’s Activity Book.
• Arts and crafts projects which allow children to express themselves.
• Singing and listening to music.
• Playing games.
• Connecting with leaders and other children of divorce.
• Stretching and exercising to help reduce stress levels.
• Reading scripture.
• Eating together.

How Do I Find a DC4K Group in My Area?

Go to http://www.dc4k.org/findagroup and enter your zip code, or search internationally, to find a group in your area.

An Introduction to My First DC4K Experience

When I originally envisioned this article, I didn’t expect it to be as long as it eventually turned out to be. I thought I might hit on some the highlights and some of the things I learned from my time and be done. In the end, I decided that perhaps the best thing I could do was to give you a glimpse into our class itself so that you can see how a class like DC4K can impact the adults who run it and, more importantly, the kids who attend. Continue reading

Children of divorce suffer many consequences because of the divorce of their parents (legacies of divorce). Many legacies of divorce can cause immediate problems for some children. Other legacies impact the child of divorce for years to come. While some children seem to breeze through the divorce of their parents with no lasting impact at the time the divorce occurs, many will find themselves wrestling with various consequences later on in life and throughout their adult years.

Several researchers divide the legacies of divorce into two different time frames. Short-term legacy is the term used to define the consequences that affect the child at the time the divorce occurs and immediately following. Long-term legacy represents those consequences that impact the child of divorce later on in their teen or adult years.

Not every child of divorce will personally experience every short-term or long-term legacy. Much depends on the child’s support system, the child’s personality, the relationship with both parents, how the child is told about the divorce, how the parents experience the divorce individually, and the relationship, actions and attitudes of the parents after the divorce occurs.

There are a number of short-term legacy effects that you might see in children of divorce. In this article, we will examine 9 different short-term legacy effects. Continue reading

One of our goals at Hope 4 Hurting Kids is to find very practical ways to serve hurting kids and their families. For us, it is not enough to just speak or write generally about children who are hurting; we want to serve those children directly, and their families. We also seek to serve those who work with hurting children. One very effective means and practical way that we can serve these kids and this community is through prayer.

James 5:13-16 tells us:

¹³ Is anyone among you suffering? Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing praise. ¹⁴ Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. ¹⁵ And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven. ¹⁶ Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working.

Prayer is important, and it is something that God calls us to do for one another. There are so many verses in the Bible dealing with prayer that I can’t possibly include them all here, but I do want to share a couple:

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Scripture includes the revelation of God, and as such it guides and forms our view of all things – including divorce. Too many churches and ministries avoid this topic for fear of the backlash from their congregations. It is time that we, as the Church, stood up in love and took a position on this issue.

Before we get into the scriptural passages about divorce, I want to say a couple of words of Hope 4 Hurting Kids. Our primary focus when it comes to divorce is not on the cause of the divorce or the classification of divorce but on the outcomes of that divorce when it comes to the millions of children who go through their parents’ divorce.

Whether you agree with the position set forth below, or hold some other view, the fact of the matter is that for children the divorce of their parents is a stressful, traumatic and life changing event. We should not, and cannot, let our views on divorce itself keep us from working together to help the children of divorce.  Nonetheless, we do believe that God is our ultimate guide, and He has chosen to provide us with insight into divorce within scripture.

With that caveat, here is what we believe the Bible teaches about divorce. We have included scripture references for your review: Continue reading