Children of Divorce Don’t Necessarily Feel Safety in Numbers

Sometimes just one little comment triggers the sad, nervous feeling Lauren Recchia gets in her stomach when her parents’ divorce comes up, even four years after the split.

“You have a dad?” a fellow third-grader asked recently when 8-year-old Lauren produced a homework paper her father had helped her complete the night before. “It doesn’t seem like you do.”

Comments like those only deepen the feeling that Lauren and many other children from divorced families say they have: Even though new data indicates single-parent homes are more common than ever, many such children still feel like outsiders.

The University of Chicago’s biennial General Social Survey, taken last year, found that more than a fifth of children in surveyed households lived in single-parent homes--a fourfold increase since the first survey in 1972. The 2000 Census found a similar trend.

Lauren is one of those children.

Most of the time, she lives with her mother just outside Traverse City, a Lake Michigan resort town that--counting the outlying subdivisions among the region’s cornfields, hardwood forests and cherry orchards--is home to about 78,000 people. She’s with her dad, a doctor who lives nearby, on Wednesday nights and many weekends.

“We both get a lot of special one-on-one time with her,” says Lauren’s mother, Dr. Kim Coleman, a pediatrician. “So that’s been one good thing to come out of a difficult situation.”

Still, in the last year, Coleman has noticed Lauren worrying more about what people think, setting off those familiar butterflies or a case of the “angries” when the divorce, or her father’s more recent split from his second wife, come up.

“When it bothers you,” Lauren says, sitting on her bed at her mom’s house, “it bothers you a lot.”

There are those children who say divorce has actually improved their lives.

“At first, it was the most horrible thing,” says 14-year-old Tori Schemelia, who lives in East Windsor, N.J., with her father and his new wife. Now, says her 10-year-old sister, Emily, “there’s no yelling at all.”

Others say they never really get over it, including Timothy Dickey, a writer from Los Angeles whose parents divorced each other twice in the 1970s.

“I could probably guess if someone’s parents are divorced or not, just by talking to them for a few minutes,” says Dickey, now 32. “There’s more cynicism.”

Even with the growing number of children going through divorce today, experts say services for them are sorely lacking, especially in a legal system known for pitting parent versus parent.

Andrew Schepard, director of the Center for Children, Families and Law at Hofstra University on New York’s Long Island, helped found a court-based program in his county that is one of a small but growing number that provide social workers and therapists specifically for children of divorcing parents.

The many children from divorced families she was seeing in her medical practice--and the lack of coordinated services--also inspired Lauren’s mom to help set up the Divorce Resource Center in Traverse City 18 months ago.

She hopes what’s starting as an information hotline will grow into a nonprofit center with everything from neutral space for parents to exchange children to bus service to the local women’s shelter.

“Divorce is a part of our culture,” Coleman says. “We can either pretend it isn’t there, or we can provide resources for people who are trying to make that transition.”

Among other things, the center tracks services for children, including a support group at one elementary school for students whose parents have split. Students at Sabin Elementary call it the “divorce club.”

To get them talking, social worker Deb Newhouse sometimes hands students a backpack full of rocks painted with the names of feelings and emotions that may be weighing them down.

She holds up a green rock with the word “SHAME” on it.

“I’m always amazed how much they know what that is,” Newhouse says.

In the end, kids often find they share the same worries.

“They want their parents to get along. They want to know it’s not their fault,” she says. “And they want to know that even though the family looks different, they’ll be taken care of.”

One of the big things on Lauren’s mind lately is her mother’s upcoming marriage in August.

She admits that she’s having trouble sharing her mom with her new boyfriend. And she says she’s also trying to give up a longtime dream: that her parents will get back together.

“It’s like wanting a doll that costs a billion dollars,” Lauren says.

Her mom is aware of Lauren’s feelings--and divorce statistics. A new federal study found that nearly 40% of second marriages for women end in separation or divorce within 10 years.

But she’s optimistic her new marriage will give Lauren the sense of family she’s been craving.

“I used to feel so bad for Lauren. I mean, my dad used to come home and give my mom a hug and a kiss. They’ve always been so respectful of one another,” Coleman says.

“I want Lauren to know what that’s like. And I think she will--I really do.”

The KidsPeace site with divorce info for teens is at https://www.teencentral.net. Children and Divorce site is at https://www.childrenanddivorce.com.