How Your Child's Schooling Is Impacted By Divorce
As the rise in divorce rates is steadily matched by a decline in the influence of such traditional institutions as the church and the family itself, schools are increasingly faced with a dilemma of national significance. The pressure on schools to act as second parent to its students has been growing constantly since the sixties when the drug and sexual revolutions spread to school campuses. Often, at that time, the schools chose to act as go-betweens in the conflicts of parents and students, trying to bridge what became known as the generation gap.
In the era of abandoned formality, teachers began to be called by their first rather than last names, and became as much mentors and confidants to their students as they were teachers. Now educators and school administrators believe that disruptions in family life have replaced the social turmoil of the sixties with a far more fundamental impact. And the schools are more involved than ever. Children have two basic homes, their own and the school. When something goes wrong in the home, they look for help at the other.
Though the attitudes of educators may be polarized, the impact of divorce on children as students is distressingly clear. During the upheaval of divorce, children's academic achievements are more apt to become losses. Their grades go down, their homework assignments are completed irregularly, if at all, and their attention spans lessen, along with their ability to concentrate. Sometimes preschool and primary school-aged children just plain go to sleep in class, exhausted by the stress at home.
There seems to be no age limit to poor performance in school, though gender does seem to be a factor. One highly touted study found that from elementary school right through high school, boys from single-parent homes were more often classified as "low achievers" with grades of D and F than children from intact families. At the other end of the bell curve, more boys from intact families were classified as "high achievers," with grades of A and B, than were boys from single-parent families. Only girls from high-income single-parent homes seemed exempt from the problem, showing better grades than boys in similarly affluent two parent families.
The youngest children more openly display their problems in the classroom, not being old enough yet to differentiate between the separate worlds of home and school. Preschoolers often become regressively confused, forgetting the names and functions of familiar objects. The cognitive confusion about their parents' split, which leads some preschoolers to think that the loss of one parent signifies the imminent loss of the other, naturally affects them and their learning abilities. In one study, teachers' reports on preschoolers whose parents were divorcing included such academically inhibiting behavior as high restlessness, distractibility, fear of failure, excessive day-dreaming, and clinging to the teacher.
