Marriage and Family: The Impact of Divorce among School Children

 Marriage and Family: The Impact of Divorce among School Children

Following my ethnographic essay about Marriage and Family: The Impact of Divorce among School Children, I chose to research the students from Mount Lavender School. Mount Lavender School accommodates students from grade one to eight in addition to offering O level studies. I figured it was the best place to conduct my research because the student population comprised of students from different family backgrounds. I incorporated the use of some terminologies such as Culture, society, marriage, family and divorce. These terms are crucial because they appear throughout the essay despite giving readers a chance to understand the research topic. The first term I described was Culture, which is actions that define a group of people in terms of religion, beliefs, music and arts (Oldham 363). I also defined term society as an arrangement of a fraction of people based on regions and resources. The term marriage describes the union of two people who are either culturally or legally recognized whereas the term family traditionally refers to a group of people sharing ancestors (McLanahan and Isabel 6). The last term that I used in my essay is the term divorce; and it used to describe the termination and dissolution of marriage.

In the essay, I argue that the impact of divorce among schoolchildren has affected the children in this case grade one to eight students negatively. I described some of the negative ways the students were affected and realized that cognitive developments, social developments and communication skills were some of the main areas of development that were affected. I observed that the students from divorced families and families undergoing a divorce procedure, either had poor academic qualifications and regularly got in trouble with the school for bullying, or they lacked the social skills to interact with other students and also struggled with drug abuse and self- esteem issues. An interesting observation that I made was the financial aspect because other than infidelity it is also a major cause of divorce. Furthermore, the financial aspect also appears as a challenge faced by most single parents as a result of divorce, and how a lack of financial stability affects the cognitive growth of children. Generally, in a family, a father is the provider, while the mother complements a father’s role (Lundberg et al., 82). So I concluded that the divorced families undergo financial constraints while struggling to keep up with debts, school fees and basic needs because only one parent acts as the provider. Eventually, the children suffer because they can relate to the struggles their divorced parents are going through.