Children must know that they are not the cause of their parents’ divorce

In order to effectively explain your divorce to your children, you need to understand the reasons for it yourself. It takes months or years of considerable deliberation and unhappiness before most couples make the decision to end their marriage and even then, the reasons are often unclear to the divorcing spouses themselves.

Sometimes one spouse will decide that the unhappiness or pain that they are experiencing in the marriage is worse than the pain that divorce will bring to everyone involved, and divorce becomes the only solution for them. This decision is not always so understandable to the other spouse or to their children.

There are also times in which the decision to divorce is mutual. Both spouses may decide that their marriage is not working and they settle the divorce amicably. With disruptions kept to a minimum, the divorcing spouses and their children will be able to begin rebuilding a different life. Such divorces are rare; and even in such instances, the children will still experience loss and change.

The majority of divorces are the result of a complicated process between the couple. Every divorce is unique, just as each marriage is unique. It would be impossible to list of all the reasons why marriages that begin happily end painfully. However, there are several main causes of divorce in the United States (some of these reasons are interrelated). It is the couple’ s inability to communicate, compromise, or change on these issues that finally results in the decision to divorce.