The Divorce Process| Impact on Adults| Impact on Children| Co-parenting | Evaluation

When parents decide not to live together, for whatever reasons, they create a new and different world for their children.  The children will be affected every day by their parents’ decisions and actions: how they structure their new world, how they manage it, how they help their children understand it and live in it, and how they relate to each other.  Special circumstances such as family violence, substance abuse, abandonment, isolation, etc., increase the concern for healthy outcomes for children.

Separating and divorcing parents have to communicate with each other about the care of their children.  If possible, they need to develop a new relationship that focuses on their children, when often what they’d like most is to get the other parent out of their lives forever.  Even when parents have never been married and never lived together, if they both intend to be responsible parents to their children, they face a lifelong relationship with each other.  And when one parent is never involved in the children’s lives, the other parent has to help the child cope with and understand that parent’s absence.

Impact on Adults Speaking Notes

Handout | Learning Module |

This program was designed and is directed by North Carolina Cooperative Extension.