The Need
Experiencing your parents’ divorce or separation is a deeply traumatic event, no matter the circumstances or how old you were when it happened. (This includes people whose parents were never married, or who received an annulment following a civil divorce, and other situations - see the question about the word ‘separation’ in our FAQs.) Divorce or separation can and does affect a person’s sense of identity, their faith life and relationship to God, their mental and physical health, their view of marriage, their own relationships, and so much more, as shown in numerous scholarly works and first-person testimonials. And the effects of divorce or separation are long-lasting, often resurfacing at holidays and life’s milestones. Check out our extensive research page for a closer looks at the effects of divorce on children.
That is not to say that a child of divorce or separation is fated to unhappiness, or doomed to repeat his or her parents’ mistakes – far from it! Thanks be to God, deep healing is real and possible. But it’s crucial to begin by facing head-on how deeply painful the effects of divorce or separation are, how very many people experience that pain, and how little is done to help them.
Consider:
1,000,000 children a year experience their parents' divorce.1
2/3 of young adults who were regularly attending a church or synagogue at the time of their parents’ divorce say that no-one – neither from the clergy nor the congregation – reached out to them at that time.2
25% of Americans claim no formal religious identity, a crisis in part caused by children of divorce leaving their faith because they believed that the Church wasn’t listening or ministering to their wounds.3
40% greater chance of divorce by adult children of divorce,4 which is caused in part by unhealed wounds that may lead to beliefs and behaviors that harm relationships.
47% more likely to be currently cohabiting, compared to those who were raised in intact, married families,5 partially due to their unhealed fear of marital commitment and subsequent rejection.
And yet very few dioceses, parishes, or college campuses have ministry dedicated specifically to the needs of men and women with divorced or separated parents. The need is tremendous! But for those who do receive deep healing, the ripple effects are exponential – affecting not only themselves but all of their relationships, their marriages and families, their religious vocations, and so on. The pain caused by divorce is deep, but God’s healing goes deeper. Partner with us today to bring healing to adult children of divorce or separation.
Make a difference. Bring Life-Giving Wounds to your diocese, campus, or parish.
1 Paul Sullins, “The Tragedy of Divorce for Children” in Torn Asunder: Children, the Myth of the Good Divorce, and the Recovery of Origins, ed. Margaret Harper McCarthy (Grand Rapids: Eerdsman, 2017), pg. 19.
2 Elizabeth Marquardt, Between Two Worlds, pg. 155, citing findings from her “National Survey on the Moral and Spiritual Lives of Children of Divorce”.
3 “How Decades of Divorce Helped Erode Religion” in the Washington Post citing the study “Exodus: Why Americans are Leaving Religion – and Why They’re Unlikely to Come Back” by the Public Religion Research Institute; Leora E. Lawton and Regina Bures, “Parental Divorce and the ‘Switching’ of Religious Identity” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 40, no.1 (March 2011): 106.
4 Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in Their Own Marriages (2005), 74, and “More Evidence for Trends in the Intergenerational Transmission of Divorce” in the journal Demography vol. 48, no.2 (May 2011): 581 - 92
5 W. Bradford Wilcox, “The Evolution of Divorce,” National Affairs I (2009): 87.
6 Richard P. Fitzgibbons, “Children of Divorce: Conflicts and Healing” in Torn Asunder (2017), pg. 60.