Divorce Disrupts The Very Being of Children Who Experience It
Vermählung Mariens by Richard van Orley (Künstler_in) - Albertina, Austria - Public Domain.
[Editor’s Note: The below blog post was one of the projects of our 2025 summer intern.]
Life-Giving Wounds is a needed ministry for our times! Scientific research is finally affirming what the Church has been teaching all along about the importance of fidelity in marriage for the well-being of children and spouses.
In a recent study put out by the Center for Economic Studies, data shows that children of divorced parents have an elevated risk of jail time (40% increase), elevated risk of mortality (45% increase), increased risk of teen birth (60% increase), and reduced adult earnings (9-13% reduction). Researchers conducted a longitudinal study on a sample of more than five million U.S. children born between 1988-1993 whose parents divorced. They collected their data from U.S. Census Bureau data and tax records from these participants and found shocking results. The most common reasons spouses divorce that they noted do not have to do with high-conflict relationships, such as in cases of abuse or major life-changing events. Rather they are due to slow-moving relationship dynamics, like financial disputes. This challenges the commonly-held belief that divorce typically happens to help protect spouses and children from high-conflict or dangerous situations. This study marks a milestone in our scientific community’s recognition of divorce as a trauma that has significant adverse effects on children who experience it, and is a great piece of scientific leverage for our ministry to stand on.
Before we dive into the study’s findings and conclusions, it would be helpful to lay out a comprehensive picture of God’s original plan for married life and the procreation of children.
A Brief Synopsis of God’s Design for Marriage & Family Life: A Call to Image Trinitarian Unity
“Love is a union of persons.” - St. Pope John Paul II, Love and Responsibility
In the Lord’s design, He created man and woman as sexually different yet complementary persons, who in union together bear an image of Trinitarian love in the Sacrament of Marriage. Upon entering the sacrament, spouses commit themselves to one another, professing their love for each other to be free, total, faithful, and fruitful in the presence of the Lord and His Church. They thereby establish a covenant with each other and with God when they enter into this sacrament, which is entered into for the duration of their lives. These professions before God and His Church endow man and woman with the sacramental grace they need to live out marriage in this life. They freely commit themselves to one another, meaning they come to the sacrament not coerced in any way, but freely choose one another as life partners. They give themselves totally to each other, meaning they hold nothing back from one another, an offering of one’s full self. They vow to be faithful to one another, meaning promising to remain in this relationship together “until death do us part.” Finally, they both profess they are open to life and to becoming fruitful co-creators of new life with God. The Sacrament of Marriage, therefore, properly embraced and responsibly carried out, bears witness to Trinitarian Love.
Christ as a model for spousal love
Christ’s Passion is a guide for Christian lovers. Christ’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection reveals to man that making a gift of self is an essential part of the nature of Love. This gift of self is most definitively expressed through Christ’s passion for us on the Cross, and it finds its continued expression in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as well as its ‘completion,’ in a sense, when we receive Jesus in the Eucharist. This is because in the Eucharist, Christ offers us “His flesh as true food, and His blood as true drink” (John. 6:55). This heavenly food sustains us throughout life, and is similarly reflected in the reciprocal self-gift man and woman give to one another in and through the marital act in the context of the Sacrament of Marriage.
Not only do spouses enter a union of reciprocal self-giving love, but their very gift of self to each other, in turn can co-create, with God, new life. In Trinitarian Love, the love between the Father and the Son begets the third Person of the Trinity, the Spirit. Similarly, although not exactly the same, when married spouses come together in love, their union creates new life. This is true even of infertile couples, because in their love for one another expressed through their bodies, this act, by design, is an act of self-gift and openness to God’s gift of new life, whether or not a new person is in fact conceived. The nature of self-giving as being life-bearing is most profoundly modeled for us by our Savior on the Cross! Jesus’ gift of Himself for us is the means by which we attain life.
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (John 15:13)
“I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” (John. 10:10-11)
Moving from the Divine Design to Fallen Reality: Divorce harms children’s understanding of their identity & destiny
“You formed my inmost being; You knit me in my mother’s womb. I praise You, because I am wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works! My very self You know.” (Psalm 139:13-14)
“I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy.” (John 16:20)
Based on God’s design for marriage, it is His Will that every child be conceived in the context of spousal self-giving love and know that their identity originates from the love of their parents. Yet, in the context of divorce, when this relationship of familial love is fractured and torn apart, an ACOD may struggle to believe his or her origin is founded in the love between her parents. Similarly, a child of divorce may feel confused about his or her destiny by not seeing reflected in his or her parents the love for which God has created the child. This reality becomes even more confusing when the introduction of new households comes about.
Can a mother forget the baby at her breastand have no compassion on the child she has borne?
Though she may forget,
I will not forget you!
See, I have engraved you on the palms of my hands;
your walls are ever before me…
I, the Lord, am your Savior,
your Redeemer. (Isaiah 49:15-16, 26)
Not only may a child bear the loss of knowing that his identity and destiny originates in love and is for love, often children of divorce experience even great confusion and hurt within themselves when they are asked to be a floater between their parent’s homes. They forget about their own needs for knowing who they are and what they are made for, and instead become silently forced to adjust to new households, and new relationship dynamics with their parents and others who may enter the ‘family.’ “When there are two family worlds, the child is asked to do the impossible. To find his being in two opposed worlds, he is asked to be two people” (Root, p. 85). As ACODs, we can all relate to Root’s explanation of the experience of our being, and therefore our identity and destiny, becoming utterly confused and uprooted when, instead of receiving it from and in the context of our families, we are expected to adjust to the two new worlds around us.
This experience has drastic consequences on our identity and understanding of our purpose in life. We are robbed of the childhood we are created for—a childhood where we can receive our identity and see reflected in our parents the mission we have to live as persons who make mutual gifts of themselves in love. No wonder so many struggle with understanding God’s love for them as His children and receive the reality that they are created for love with another, and ultimately with God. This most foundational reality of our origin and destiny becomes lost and frustrated through the pain of divorce. We need more than social capital responses to our pain!
“A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.” (John 10:10)
Putting the Pieces Together…What did these researchers think of these results and what should be done about them?
Being a study put on by the Center for Economic Studies, the researchers focused their proposed interventions on “family-focused efforts to improve economic opportunity” (Johnston, et. al, p. 32). Their recommendations were: to implement policies that financially support families going through a divorce, provide education and research to couples to help maintain a stable marriage, offer school-based interventions to help lessen the impact on children facing divorce, and create a culture of it being a normal duty of non-resident parents to engage with and financially support their children. These solutions ought to be celebrated insofar as they resemble a recognition that divorce is a trauma with significant adverse effects on children’s outcomes and offer recommendations to help in some external ways. On the other hand, they fail to offer care to the human person at the level of his or her being, making these solutions incomplete on their own.
Social Capital Responses to Divorce Neglect Caring for our Being in Need
The solutions offered by the CES article largely can be described as “social capital” remedies to treating the problem of divorce. If adopted and exercised, they all would work to support the child experiencing divorce and would help make an impact amongst marriages staying intact, yet they are missing something, the most important thing…
Andrew Root, in his book, Children of Divorce, notes:
Divorce is much more than a psychological or sociological reality. It is about something deeper than economic advantage, psychological stability, or social capital. Divorce is a threat to a child’s very ontology, to his or her very being. (Root, vxii)
The being that Root speaks of refers to the human person as such—as a being willed by God to be and willed to be for a specific purpose. This understanding of personal identity and mission comes from our Church’s rich teaching on the dignity of the human person and our identity and destiny as God’s beloved children, made for communion with God and others.
Why Our Ministry Matters!...By His Wounds we have been Healed
“He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed.” (1 Peter. 2:24)
This is where Life-Giving Wounds ministry comes into play. The mission of Life-Giving Wounds involves healing our most interior wounds by allowing our wounds to be touched and transformed by Jesus Christ, who bears His own wounds eternally. In doing so, we experience Christ’s understanding of our pain—a pain which so often the world rejects or overlooks. What joy it is, then, that we get to share even more closely in Christ’s own life through bearing these wounds! What a consolation it is that Christ still bears His own wounds caused by fallen humans, eternally. It is therefore, “by our wounds that we are healed” in Christ Jesus, and by them that we come to realize just how dear a place we have in the Lord’s Sacred Heart. In embracing our pain, as the Lord embraced His, we actually become truly free, and we experience an even more invigorating and meaningful life, with a restored and strengthened sense of our identity as the Lord’s beloved children with a destiny of eternal life with God in sight.
Divorce is truly a core-wound; meaning, it tears into the very fabric of our soul and disrupts our understanding of ourselves and reality. Our very livelihood is threatened in a most fundamental way when we experience divorce because our being does not know where to find its place. While this CES research study ought to be rejoiced in, insofar as it is great that the scientific community has studied divorce as a trauma and considered the adverse effects it has on children, their solutions are lacking fullness and a consideration of the core of the human person’s need for knowing who they are and what they are made for. Our ministry hopes to bring the message of Chirst’s healing to ACOD’s to restore them in their identity as beloved children of God, destined to make a gift of themselves to another person in love in this life, in preparation for total union with God, who is Love, in the life to come.
References:
Johnston, Andrew C., Jones, Maggie R., Pope Nolan G. “Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children’s Adult Outcomes.” Center of Economic Studies (CES) 25-28, (May 2025). https://lehd.ces.census.gov/applications/creat/paper-profile/1333.
New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC
Root, Andrew. The Children of Divorce: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Youth, Family, and Culture). August 1, 2010, Baker Academic.
Prayer in Defense of Marriage:
God our Father, we give you thanks
for the gift of marriage: the bond of life and love,
and the font of the family.
The love of husband and wife enriches your Church with children,
fills the world with a multitude of spiritual fruitfulness and service,
and is the sign of the love of your Son, Jesus Christ, for his Church.
The grace of Jesus flowed forth at Cana at the
request of the Blessed Mother. May your Son,
through the intercession of Mary, pour out upon us
a new measure of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
as we join with all people of good will
to promote and protect the unique beauty of marriage.
May your Holy Spirit enlighten our society
to treasure the heroic love of husband and wife,
and guide our leaders to sustain and protect
the singular place of mothers and fathers
in the lives of their children.
Father, we ask that our prayers
be joined to those of the Virgin Mary,
that your Word may transform our service
so as to safeguard the incomparable splendor of marriage.
We ask all these things through Christ our Lord,
Amen.
(The above prayer was found on the USCCB website here.)
About the author:
Raised in Maryland, Libby grew up going between her dad’s and mom’s houses since she was 3 years old, when her parents divorced. She is a recent graduate of Franciscan University of Steubenville, where she earned her B.A. in Philosophy, and is beginning graduate studies at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C. this fall 2025. She loves being in nature, has a special affinity for fall-scented candles, and has a great appreciation for her friends, especially those who she’s met along her journey of faith over the past seven years since her conversion to Catholicism in high school. Libby is passionate about St. John Paul II’s insights on the love between man and woman, and loves leading others to relationship with Christ. In her free time, she enjoys cooking & baking, walks in nature, and creating art, especially writing!
Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals:
God’s original plan for marriage and the family is written into every human heart. How did reflection on God’s original plan for every human speak to your heart?
What were the ways you related to this article?
What aspects of this article were difficult to understand or read for you?
What do you think of the “social capital” remedies provided by CES to treating the problem of divorce? Are they sufficient? Are they lacking?
How can ministries, such as Life-Giving Wounds, compliment the work of the CES authors?
What are your thoughts on the statistics provided by CES at the top of this article?
If you have read the study, Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes, what other thoughts do you have on it?
Healing happens when we journey together. To aid you in this journey, we created a new quiz to better understand the impact of parental divorce on your life.
Answer 35 questions and we will send you a personalized report.
If you’re an adult child of divorce or separation, this quiz is a space to reflect on how your past may still be impacting your present—especially in areas like faith, identity, relationships, and family life.
You’ll respond to a series of statements that invite honest self-reflection. At the end, you will receive insight into your potential, deepest areas of pain—and suggestions for next steps in healing.
