Castleton Public Library discussion

I'm interested in what people think about the impact of divorced parents on kids. In "Beautiful Boy...," the father brings up studies that show the negative impact of a child having to divide his or her life between parents' lives. If parents are divorced, a child may have two bedrooms, one set of friends at mom's, one set of friends at dad's, and may have to say 'goodbye' more times to people he or she is close to than a child with parents who are still living together. An impossible question to answer (I think):Are two parents who live together unhappily better than two parents who live happily apart?

Am,
I think that the question may be, how does each individual perceive their situation? For example, I have two siblings and we all lived through mainly the same life experiences, yet we have vastly different views of our childhood. I think that maybe it is not necessarily the actual experience that affects us, but how it is perceived. Does that make sense?

Yes. I agree. It has a lot to do with that. I also think that maybe kids aren't concerned with their parents relationship as much as they are concerned with how that relationship impacts their life. I feel as though we focus on divorced parents causing strain on kids because they see the broken relationship. It may be that kids aren't as negatively impacted by that as much as they are impacted by leaving their friends every weekend to spend time with one parent. Maybe divorce would be less negative if kids were able to keep the house after the divorce and their parents visited the kid. Going to a parents house for the summer, as Nic did, meant saying goodbye to his dad, his friends and his routine. His dad may not have known about his problem because he missed a lot of Nic's growing up during the summer. Essentially, Nic lived two lives and he lived two lives: relapse then rehab for the summer. I do think that may have a lot to do with stressing out kids and just like we all go through the same situations and feel different about them, I think there are still imbalances in each of us that may push us toward something like addiction.