Children Coping With Divorce
What Schools Can Do To Help

Children coping with divorce spend a large portion of their day at school. Because of this, teachers and educational professionals are the ones who are observing the effects that divorce is having on the kids. They are the ones that are noticing changes in the children’s behavior, changes in their academic performance and changes in their personalities.

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Schools need to step up and increase their interventions with children and divorce because the effects of divorce are not only impairing the children’s emotional health, but it is also impairing the school’s ability to educate them. With the rate of divorces impacting more than 50 percent of some school’s populations, negative academic effects can actually jeopardize a school’s ability to qualify for federal funding.

The first thing that schools can do to help children coping with divorce is to identify the problems that they are having. This is a very useful service for parents. After all parents aren’t around to see school time behaviors changes, and in many cases they aren’t being informed when their children’s school work starts to suffer. By being more proactive in identifying problems and reporting them to parents, student problems can be dealt with early on instead of being allowed to fester and develop into long term habits.

Another step that schools can take to help parents and children affected by divorce is to offer psychological counseling to students. This can be handled with one on one counseling and/or with group counseling sessions. Student support groups and parent support groups can also be facilitated and mediated by schools to help the student population to adjust better to the changes caused by divorce.

Schools can also set up support hot lines that children coping with divorce can call if they need someone to talk with. Similar hot lines have been set up by several large school districts and non-profit organizations to help prevent school crimes and to help reduce suicide rates. Similar counseling lines can easily be set up following these models to address divorce issues.

The final thing that schools can do to help both parents and children coping with divorce and function better is to encourage parent involvement in their kids’ education. This can be done by offering parents volunteering opportunities, by scheduling more frequent parent teacher conferences and by creating a way for parents and teachers to communicate on a regular basis. All of these strategies can help parents to develop better relationships with their kids and to help children cope with divorce and to identify problems that their kids are having as they develop.