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Michael Greenberg Professor Keaton ENC1102-31 28 March 2014 JTC Part #2 Draft 1 Divorce and grades. Two aspects of life that millions people all around the world have to deal with sometime in their lives. Something like grades younger people have to obtain every day while divorce may happen only once in a lifetime. Both have similar features to them for example both divorce and grades can hurt a person but in different ways. Grades can affect a persons attitude towards school, and also drive to learn. While in the case of divorce it can figuratively destroy an individual's heart because of separation from their loved ones. Surprisingly there is a correlation between the two with divorce and grades. Divorce is mainly seen as a negative impact on the childs education which includes his or her overall grades. Anybody who has been affected by divorce would be my audience in this paper. The main ideas that will be featured in this paper are the different effects of divorced mentioned by each of my sources. Each source mentions that divorce does have a negative impact but the effects in each source are different. My audience should care about my paper because the audience can hopefully relate to the topic of divorce and how his or her education was affected by this event. My topic is important because like said in the paper it affects millions of people every year. Also the importance of this topic is very high because so many people can relate to this research. By the end of this paper I hope the readers will understand how divorce in most cases does seem to hurt a students grades some short term others long-term it is different for every person affected by divorce.

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To begin with the relationship between the parents becoming divorced and their child play key aspects in the effects of the child. Wijckmans research includes that research has stated that divorce weakens the ties between the parent and their adult children. The effects of divorce go in both directions in regards to support of one another. The results show that divorce is positively associated with norms of family obligations, even after controlling for the exchange of support between the generations and the perceived quality of the relationship. Having divorced parents was found to correlate positively with family obligations (Wijckman 306). Wijckman also states that people who have experienced loss through divorce, either from a parent or a partner, and having experienced the hardships a divorce might bring with it, may result in stronger family norms, regardless of the behavior individuals show. When a divorce occurs some people are more hurt than others. Also in Wijckmans research I found that if the parents of a child are become divorced that child feels stronger family ties than that of a child whose parents do not get divorced. Furthermore Molepos research states that teachers believe that younger children from divorced parents were more likely to have emotional and behavioral challenges than those from intact families. Both Molepo and Wijckmans research try to prove that the relationship between the children and his or her parents plays a key role in determine if the effects of a divorce will be smaller or larger for that child. In addition the age of the child also plays a key aspect in the effects of the child. In Jennifer E. Langfords findings Parental divorce was related to boys externalizing trajectories differently depending on the timing of the divorce. In particular, parental divorce during elementary school was related to an increase in boys externalizing behaviors that began in the year of the divorce and persisted for years afterward. Parental divorce during middle school was related to an increase in boys externalizing behaviors in the years the divorce declined (5-6).

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The behavior of the children becomes worse and worse after the divorce occurred. Also on page ten of Langsfords research she says that children who grades are dropping are the same children whose internal or external problems are increasing following their parents divorce. The children whose grades drop blame their parents divorce as an excuse for their unacceptable grades. The older the child is the more recent the divorce is the more he will blame his grades falling on the divorce. The younger the child is the less likely to blame his or her grades falling because of the divorce. Molepo adds that there is an emotional and behavioral adjust effect and the effect is more clearly observed in only the younger children and not for the older children. In the source by Molepo he says that the younger the child is the more quickly he is at adjusting to the effects of his or her families divorce.