This study's findings tell us instead that the needs of children are often vastly different from those of parents. What makes adults happy may indeed leave children bereft and miserable. Additionally, the authors contend, divorce scatters emotional land mines across the child's present and future landscape, so that throughout his or her young life and well into adulthood each developmental hurdle trips yet another explosion. Divorce is a life-transforming experience. After divorce, childhood is different.
Adolescence is different.
Whether the final outcome is good or bad, the whole trajectory of an individual's life is profoundly altered by the divorce experience. Indeed, no one would contest the conclusion that divorce is a source of complex and often enduring pain for children and adolescents. Children frequently lose access to one parent after a divorce. Usually it is the father whose role becomes increasingly marginalized. In a large majority of divorces, mothers are awarded custody of their children.