Family during the divorce form the child’s perspective
Abstract
The divorce of parents is a situation which in the long term affects life of everyone involved. The aim of this study is to describe the parents’ divorce from the child’s point of view. The perception of the family by children was examined by the FAST method. The children presented a typical, an ideal and a conflict representation of the family. We compared the group of 15 children in a divorce situation with a group of 19 children in stable family environment without significant parental conflicts. The average age of children in both groups was 9,5 years (range 5 – 15 years). We were interested in the family members, cohesion and the description of family conflicts. Children in parents’ divorce described a lower cohesion not only in the parents’ relationship but also between themselves and both parents. This supports the spillover concept in the family and is in harmony with findings, which point out the inferior quality of parenthood after the divorce. Children, whose parents were in the process of divorce during the collecting of data, included into the family also relatives outside the primary family. However, their membership in the family was not permanent. It seems that these children are seeking for support in relationships within the extended family or they substitute the quality (the worsening of quality after the divorce) by quantity in relationships. They also describe family conflicts with worse results, and they don’t describe effective strategies of solving conflicts.
https://doi.org/10.29364/epsy.336
(Fulltext in Czech)
Keywords
family, cohesion, conflict, children, relationships, divorce of parentsLiterature
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