Children who grow up with divorced parents have many adjustment difficulties. There is a strong impact of divorce, and understanding it helps the growing area of research. Preschool age children may specifically become belligerent or overly attached, grade school children may show new behaviors such as rejecting school (Kelly 1). Middle high school aged children may lack motivation, find negative influences, experiment sexually, or engage in self-harmful activities (Kelly 1). Other behaviors that are common are refusal to spend time with one parent, becoming overburdened with responsibilities and other behaviors likely serve to meet the child’s needs, and feeling guilty. Children associated specifically with parental divorce have been seen with an increase in anxiety and depression. According to research this anxiety and depression is due to the divorce event specifically, rather than every day family strain; “immediately after divorce, children in divorced families exhibit more problems in adjustment …show more content…
“Because of the long-reaching effects of divorce, follow up to families and a child of divorce is important to understanding interventions, and is reflected in many groups” (McConnell 1). Follow ups a year or more after counseling is ideal to comprehend the effects of treatments. Given this review of the literature, this study seeks to investigate the long-term effects of a group intervention for children of divorce including parents as compared with a group intervention that does not include parents. These sources share the same goal in unraveling the long-term effects children have with divorced parents. This problem has a lot of importance because this is an enormous problem with very large impacts on the youth of