Family divorce

My illness has affected my relationships in many ways. It affected my marriage, which ended in divorce. I can t say that I blame my husband for leaving. It was a very difficult situation. He took my daughter to live with him because I am too ill to care for her on a full-time basis. I see her on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays. We have a co-parenting plan that would allow me to see her more often, but I can t. She s seven, and she requires a lot of care. If I m having a bad day, it s very difficult. I miss having a family. That s real sad and hard for me to talk about. 

A targeted biopsychosocial developmental history from key informants should be included in the initial assessment. In addition to the information contained in Figure 31.1, a history of stress and trauma should also be gathered. In children and adolescents this includes caretaker absence, neglect, physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, as well as transfer to a foster home, divorce, or psychiatric disorder in a close family member. 

Life is not predictable, especially among beneficiaries. Your life may seem predictable to you, but this may not be so with younger members of your family. They may also be more conditioned to the fact that divorce can happen in all age groups—even yours. 

Over 50% of Americans who currently drink report having a close relative who abuses alcohol 25% are children of an alcoholic parent. Alcohol abuse can devastate families by causing separation, divorce, and domestic violence, as well child abuse and neglect. Six million children live with an alcohol-abusing parent, and this can result in problems at school such as low attendance, academic difficulties, attention deficit disorders, and behavioral problems. Each year in America, more than 100,000 people die from alcohol-related accidents (cars, falls, fires, drownings, burns), cancer, liver disease, and stroke. 

Chronic PCP users report all kinds of social problems. The behavioral and emotional changes that occur often lead to social withdrawal and isolation, divorce, and disassociation from family and friends. PCP abuse impairs the user s ability to think rationally, which often results in job loss. As a result of the physical and social consequences, depression often develops. 

Job productivity suffers because of the impact poor personal financial behaviors have on family fife (Garman, Leech, and Grable, 1996). For example, poor personal financial decisions may lead to loss of transportation, loss of the ability to obtain credit and adequate housing, arguments with relatives, emotional stress, spouse/child abuse, and divorce. These decisions manifest in dysfunctional work behaviors such as absenteeism, tardiness, and reduced job productivity. Table 19-1 summarizes the potential costs associated with poor employee financial behaviors. 

Survivors and family members most likely to experience adverse reactions are seemingly those with the fewest tangible resources the unemployed or poor, divorced, or female. Along these lines, Solomon and Smith... 

I married during my last year in Berkeley, in 1941, and my first wife and I had a child, Linda. We were divorced about three years later. I remarried in 1952, and Mary brought one daughter, Marianna, into the family and we have two sons, Karl and Heinrich. My given name was actually Heinrich. I m so grateful that none of my children followed my profession because it s a no-win situation if they re better than you, it can be a bit of a problem, and if they are worse than you, it s terrible. 

Stayed witli him so long, she explains that her family disapproved of divorce and kept telling her that she should try harder to make her marriage a success. She also thought about what her life would be like trying to take care of her son while working flill time and didn t think she could make it. (Published with permission of American Psychiatric Press, Inc.)... 

The laws are a well-intentional effort to deal with the dissolution of the idealized nuclear family. But by trying to accommodate divorce, family feuds and nontraditional family arrangements, they open the door to interference with parents right to raise their children without undue intrusion, even by grandparents. The Troxels case is not unique ... 

Grandparent-visitation laws did not create that erosion. More varied and complicated family structures have arisen because of divorce, decisions not to marry, single-parent families, remarriages and step-families, parents who abandon their children to temporary caretakers and children being raised by third parties because parents are deemed unfit. 

Much of Fritz Haber s personal correspondence in the following years deals with money, for there was suddenly too little of it. In the divorce settlement, he d agreed to maintain Charlotte and the children in the style to which they had been accustomed. He also wanted to support Hermann, who moved with his family from the United States to Czechoslovakia to France without finding a satisfactory job. But reckless investments in South American stocks claimed some of Haber s fortune, taxes ate up another chunk, and the world economic crisis of 1929 destroyed much of what was left. 

There are divorces occurring earlier in marriage, before larger families have had a chance to grow. 

In the United States today, an only child, no matter how beloved, is not exempt from a harsh statistic about one half of all marriages with children end in divorce. Because he or she is so tightly bonded to parents and is usually such an integral part of their marriage, parental divorce is particularly painful for an only child. Not only is the world of family broken apart, the only child feels additionally torn by opposing loyalties to parents who are in conflict with each other. 

Be prepared for some short-term lowering of academic motivation and performance at school as a function of emotional interference in the child s capacity to concentrate and study. Supervise schoolwork, but be sensitive to how the divorce is drawing off a lot of the child s energy as he or she dally struggles to adjust to divided family life. 

Do not depend on the child for emotional support, but exercise adult responsibility to provide emotional support for the child. If possible, provide an outside helperfamily friend, extended family member, or counselorwho assumes special status in the child s life for the first year or so after divorce to be a confidential companion with whom private thoughts and feelings can be safely shared. 

Divorce effectively disenfranchises each parent from having any right (except in situations where neglect, danger, or abuse occurs) to request that the other parent change his or her way of living. Each must come to respect the other s separate sphere of family influence. 

Yes. Typically, after divorce, the only child re-bonds to each parent to compensate for family security that has been lost. In the process, when the child s primary residence is with the mother, for example, the boy or girl may come to occupy a powerful, quasi-adult family role"man of the house" to the mother if a son, or mother s "best friend" if a daughter. 

This quality of the melodrama is recognizable in the most highly acclaimed films—Titanic, Shine, The English Patient. The subject matter of these recent successes echoes the famous melodramas from the past. Ambition is at the heart of All About Eve. Family violence is the core issue of Lee Tamahori s Once Were Warriors. The consequences of divorce are the subject of Robert Benton s Kramer vs. Kramer. Racism is the core of Robert Mulligan s To Kill a Mockingbird, as it is of Euzhan Palcy s A Dry White Season. 

Don t most people assume that a family is the people we live with But what about grandparents, who usually don t live with us And what about cousins, who may live across the country or even on another continent And what about distant relatives we ve never met but whose connection to us can be traced by bloodlines And what if we re the children of divorced and remarried parents Suddenly, definitions are not so simple. 

New kinds of family emerging - e.g. single parents, shared parenting. High rate of divorce. 

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