"Born again Christians are just as likely to get divorced as are non-born again adults. Overall, 33% of all born again individuals who have been married have gone through a divorce, which is statistically identical to the 34% incidence among non-born again adults.

”(Source: George Barna, “Born Again Adults Less Likely to Co-Habit, Just as Likely to Divorce,” The Barna Update, August 6, 2001, Barna Research Group [Ventura, California], www.barna.org.)

"The whole Christian upbringing is kind of tough when your parents split up. All of a sudden, everything they taught me about life, love, spirituality, family and marriage gets violated. So I had to decide to go on my own journey."

(Source: Jason Wade, Seventeen, October 2001.)

When parents divorce, their children are often forced to take on many of the burdens of parenthood. Unfortunately, this process of premature “parentification” often leaves permanent emotional scars.

To investigate the lasting impact of parental divorce as a cause of “destructive parentification,” a team of Georgia State researchers recently scrutinized data collected from 191 undergraduate psychology students. Their analysis indicates that “participants growing up in divorced families were twice as likely as those from nondivorced families to experience a destructive form of parentification . . . during childhood.”

More specifically, the Georgia State scholars found that students from broken homes reported “more Emotional Caregiving during childhood than did the nondivorced group.”

The survey results further suggest that “in the eyes of many children of divorce” the emotional caregiving that they had had to give to parents and siblings was “not duly credited, acknowledged, and reciprocated.” As a consequence, students who had experienced parental divorce were significantly more likely than peers from intact families to report the experience of “unfairness” during childhood.

In interpreting their results, the authors of the new study refer to earlier research showing that “parentification can compromise children’s development” and is therefore “predictive of adjustment difficulties in young adulthood.” It comes as no surprise, then, that in “the contemporaneous experiences of adult children of divorce” the researchers are able to perceive “destructively parentifying patterns continu[ing] to characterize the family relationships of these individuals.” It would appear that for many young adults, it is hard to escape from the dark shadow of parental divorce.

(Source: Gregory J. Jurkovic, Alison Thirkield, and Richard Morrell, “Parentification of Adult Children of Divorce,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 30[2001]: 245-257.)